9 ms·
Chatroulette Creator Is A 17-Year-Old Russian Kid
- nazgulnarsil 17y agomoot for the masses.
- kls 17y ago--I actually think that it would be best to found Chatroulette as a U.S.-based company. But this is just an idea. If that thinking starts to change it will be devastating to the US business sector.
- defen 17y ago7 Gigabits/second...can someone translate that into a dollar amount for me?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- wallflower 17y ago7 Gb/s * 0.125GB/Gb * 86,400s/d * 30d/mo * 0.0009765625TB/GB = 2215TB/month to 738TB/month ("20,000 users at night", 1/3 peak usage - 8hrs) > That’s why I have put only four links on the bottom as advertisements. And what is interesting, is that these advertisements almost cover all expenses, just those four links on the bottom! EDIT: I give up on the conversion I went to a talk once with Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services. The owners of SmugMug charge all of their AWS on a corporate credit card. We're talking multiple roundtrip tickets from bonus points a month.
- mseebach 17y agoIt's just over 200 terabytes. http://www.google.com/search?q=0.7+gigabit%2Fsecond+*+86400+seconds%2Fday+*+30+days http://www.google.com/search?q=0.7+gigabit%2Fsecond+*+86400+... I've seen traffic advertised at €15/TB in Germany, that's €3.000/month. EDIT: I screwed the units up a few times, sorry
- DougBTX 17y agoYou can simplify your query by letting Google do the units conversion. Eg, search for: 86400 seconds/day + 1 To get the same result as your link google: 0.7 gigabit/second * 30 days Or even: 0.7 gigabit/second * 1 month
- cfpg 17y agoOr ask WA: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7Gb%2Fs+to+TB%2Fmonth http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7Gb%2Fs+to+TB%2Fmonth
- necro 17y ago7Gbits/s saturated over a month is 2,247 TB http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=7Gb%2Fs+in+TB%2Fmonth&aq=f&aqi=h1&oq= http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=7Gb%2Fs+in+TB%2Fmon... So at your €15/TB i would be €33,705 / month Also €15/TB seems low as prices around the US are $0.10/GB so $100/TB which would equate to around $200k/month Of course when you are pushing that much data you're going to want to pay per Mbit/s and with bandwidth as low as $3/Mbit we get around $21,000/month What is probably happening here is that this guy has 7 dedicate servers at about $150 each per month that have a gigabit connection with say a couple of TB data allowance for each server and he's just saying that he has a capacity of 7Gb/s. The chat client is probably peer to peer so the video bandwidth for him is not that critical.
- mseebach 17y ago> 7Gbits/s saturated over a month is 2,247 TB Even the best calculation is wrong when you plug in the wrong friggin data... I confused myself from converting gbit to GB and ended up with 0.7 gbit instead of 7 .. :-S > Also €15/TB seems low That's why I do business with them :) It's hetzner.de, and their "rootserver" (€49/month and up) comes with 2.000 GB free traffic. Extra is free, but capped at 10 mbit, or €14.90/TB. The servers are connected at 100 mbit, though. I'd guess that's just to keep the ethernet infrastructure cheap, and a gbit connection would be possible for a fee. I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.
- DanBlake 17y agoThe cheapest bandwidth most can buy is about 2-3$ per mb/s in the US. Likely to be more expensive in europe. That would mean each gigabit would cost between 2k-3k USD.
- agotterer 17y agoIs it not possible to have flash directly connect with another flash user instead of routing all the traffic through central servers?
- sjf 17y agoFrom my experience a couple of years ago, no, not without installing an extension to flash.
- pmjordan 17y agoNAT/Firewalls are a bitch. I'm not a Flash expert, but as far as I know it can only open TCP connections, and only to specially set up servers (which respond positively to a policy request on a certain port). Punching holes in firewalls is pretty much a UDP-only thing in practice; Skype is one of the few apps that truly pull it off, and even that's not 100% reliable. You could in theory do it with a signed Java applet, though it will ask the user for permission for access to his entire computer, and it's not something you'd throw together in a few weeks.
- _delirium 17y agoIt looks like Flash 10.1 added something built in to do the UDP-firewall-punching and connection setup for peer-to-peer video between Flash clients: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/ No idea if that's what he's using or he rolled his own. Using Stratus seems like the most obvious option, but it looks like it's limited beta only, and the beta EULA prohibits commercial use, so if he's using it, it's unofficially.
- adamt 17y agoI am not sure the TB/month figure quoted by others is a price that would scale to this level. As a new start-up without the ability/desire to commit for a year or any credit rating, you are likely to be paying about $6 per Mbps per month. As a reference for this price in July 2008, Cogent took the bottom out of the transit bandwidth market by offering $7 per Mbps (dropping to $6 for 1Gbps committ) - (see http://connectedplanetonline.com/mag/telecom_cogent_throws_down/ http://connectedplanetonline.com/mag/telecom_cogent_throws_d...). Prices may have dropped a bit in the last 15 months, but not by that much. So at 7000 Mbps/second - I'd put the price at more like $42k per month.
- rmoriz 17y agoThis number is bogus. Why? He uses consumer servers. Each server has a maximum of one gigabit ethernet connect. Like providers counting all their network interfaces together to have a high marketing number like "12321 Gbit/s backbone" that's just a number. See my upcoming comment in the NYT blog about that.
- inmygarage 17y ago"I am glad that my relatives helped me with it by ‘investing’ some money in my idea. It wasn’t very much money, so I couldn’t just buy new servers just like that, I had to optimize my code as much as possible instead." No choice but to optimize. Love it.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- csmeder 17y agoHes not even old enough to view the most of the cams
- cousin_it 17y agoWhy, does he have no eyes? You're using American cultural assumptions where they don't apply :-)
- jacoblyles 17y agoI have a question for Hacker News. I started working on a website extremely similar to Chatroulette about three months ago (with a few interesting differences). But I haven't finished it yet because I'm busy on other things in my life, I chose some wrong technologies to get started with, and I'm not the best developer in the world. Now that I've heard of Chatroulette, should I keep on going 'til I finish my project, or move on to the next thing? My biggest concern is that I thought the site would be so cool that traffic would grow exponentially from organic word of mouth. Now that there is a Chatroulette, I'm afraid it loses its wow factor. In fact, I can still think of some features that would lower the penis count and increase the usefulness/fun of the site. edit: Is this query too off-topic? Should I start another thread? Seemed like a good place to ask.
- vaksel 17y agogo for it...there'll always be competition, and Chat Roulette doesn't have the market penetration yet. Just figure out a way to differentiate yourself. 1. Better layout, make it a truly glorious experience...a few extra KBs to load an interesting background is nothing when you are streaming gigs of data. 2. Focus on the U.S. factor. That guy is trying to have the best of both worlds, but Germany is really not that close. So focus your service on U.S. and Canada and offer faster speeds. 3. Offer easy ways to share screen caps. I dunno something like a report where you show screen cap of person #1 and screen cap of person #2 + the actual text. Host it on your own server, so that people(reddit/digg) can just link to the chats in question.
- ewjordan 17y ago4. Some way, some how, get rid of all the dicks. Or at least try to make it opt-in, or figure out a way to ban/segregate repeat offenders. Seriously. Chatroulette may be a great idea, but when 20% of the users are trying to shock the rest of them (or are "legitimately" perving out on camera), it destroys the return visitor rate. I know plenty of people, including myself, that were initially interested in the site, but couldn't get past the gross factor.
- neilk 17y ago
- maurycy 17y agoHe is an awesome and inspiring guy! I really appreciate how honest he is still, and how not sure what the service actually is.
- breck 17y agoThis has been the fastest growing site I've seen in a while. One interesting sidenote: the word "roulette" is terribly hard to spell. Pretty much every typo domain for it got snatched up pretty quickly, and are currently showing AdSense for domains. (chatroullette.com, chatroulete.com, etc.) Probably making a solid amount of money. I hope the owner himself is the one sitting on them.
- hussong 17y agoIt's only hard to spell if you have no clue about french ;-) Here's a memory hook: - "ou" because that's french for "oo", as in: douche. - "l" since it comes from "roule" or "rouler", as in: joule, boule (there is no "ll" between "ou" and "e" in french, ever). - "tt" since it's a female noun, as in: cassette, baguette, couchette.
- eam 17y agoWell I think most visitors don't know French, as the article indicates most are from the US. Even I misspelled the domain on my first try. doh!
- hussong 17y agoHonestly, it took me a minute to realize that the overlap between French and English is actually smaller than I thought (and much smaller than between English and German). I had a hard time coming up with sticky analogies for the spelling of "roulette".
- JoshRosen 17y agoThe site is also accessible at chatrt.com.
- shib71 17y agoThat would be an interesting advertising model. Keep the main application advertisement free, but buy up all the doppelgangers and advertise on those. Diabolical.
- simonw 17y agoI don't know anything about streaming video - anyone got any idea what kind of software stack he'd be running for this, and what kind of custom development he would have had to do?
- jey 17y agoFlash + Flash Media Server (or clone, like Red5). It's just a matter of plugging together the pieces.
- olegk 17y agoIs there a way to send the video stream directly to the other user, not through the server? Sort of P2P-like?
- codexon 17y agoIf you create a standalone client yes. Otherwise domain policies and firewalls will prevent this.
- abthomson 17y agoYes, and this is what chatroulette does. I did a TCP dump of the traffic and the data sent to the central servers is very minimal, mostly short plain-text messages containing little bits of information - your partner's camera status, number of users online, next button pressed, etc.
- jey 17y agoAre you absolutely sure about that? I don't think Flash supports that natively, so it would involve some real weird hackery to do something like run an RTMP server on both of the client machines in a Java applet or something, plus NAT traversal hole punching and other disgusting hackery.
- abthomson 17y agoI'm only sure because I saw a bunch of RTMP and Flex messages going to the central servers (they all have similar IP addresses) and a lot of UDP traffic going to a pretty much random IP address that changed with every person I talked to. Also, Fogbugz copilot does something similar. It's described at a high level here: https://www.copilot.com/tech/ https://www.copilot.com/tech/ which links to http://nutss.gforge.cis.cornell.edu/stunt.php http://nutss.gforge.cis.cornell.edu/stunt.php
- ams6110 17y ago...the simultaneous user count grew from 10 to 50, then from 50 to 100 and so on. Each time the user count grew, I had to rewrite my code completely, because my software and hardware couldn’t handle it all. A nice real-world example of how getting something out there is more important than trying to achieve technical perfection first. He validated the concept, then worked out the technical issues as he scaled up. Meanwhile he had some revenue coming in to help fund development and hosting.
- lolcraft 17y agoFrom the article: "I would love to visit the United States." If people like him wanted so hard to travel to my country, I'd already be rallying my government to give those people a damn grant. Time for the USA to reconsider whether the TSA's "security" pays.
- cdr 17y agoWhat? What does 'TSA security' have to do with some kid saying he wants to visit the US? Can't believe this comment was upvoted.
- gnosis 17y agoI think you misunderestimate the animosity many people hold towards the TSA. The upvotes likely reflect that animosity as much or more than simple agreement with the implication that there's some sort of connection between the TSA and the kid's inability to travel to the US. Not to mention the rest of the comment regarding giving the kid a grant.
- petercooper 17y agoExcept, really, it's more likely to be because Russia is not in the Visa Waiver Program that makes it super easy for most Europeans to head to the US on a whim.
- clay 17y agoHe'd be a lot easier to pack as a carry-on without the xray machines
- coryl 17y agoQuick, someone apply this format to dating!
- xexers 17y agoI am trying to learn German and I would love to chat with people from Germany in German. Is there a service like that? I wonder if he could modify the randomness to at least just a single country.
- ALee 17y agoSome things I find odd: A) There is something different about this site. In a craigslist (no high production value type of way). It also has very strong network effects because as more people join, the whole site becomes even more valuable. B) I feel like I need a friend with me as we play. It's odd that it feels like going into the city or a bar (never know what I'll find), but I'm also totally safe. C) This kid ABSOLUTELY needs to meet up with PG, Craig Newmark, or somebody before he's taken advantage of by a crazy VC.
- JMiao 17y agocountdown to the mixergy guy tracking him down. "HOW SOME RUSSIAN KID BUILT A SITE THAT'S BIGGER THAN YOURS" ...and how you could do it, too!
- AndrewWarner 17y agoFrankly, I'm a little slow. I should have jumped on this the minute Fred Wilson brought up the site. Update: Thanks for the prod. I sent him an email.
- petercooper 17y agoA 17-Year-Old Russian Kid As opposed to a 17 year old Russian adult? Or a 17 year old Russian senior citizen?
- rapind 17y agoReminded of when voice chat was first available on win95 via netmeeting back in the day where there were maybe 50 people tinkering with it and you just connect to any of the other early adopting nerds to tell each other how frikin cool it was. Random, anon, but friendly.
- cousin_it 17y agoThat's the Moscow State University in the photo's background. Suddenly I feel so warm!
- thomasfl 17y agoBest chat roulette screen shots: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-24-best-chat-roulette-screenshots-nsfw http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-24-best-chat-roulette-s... I kind of liked the jolly nazi&israeli couple doing thumbs up. :-)
- xiaoma 17y agoAfter reading this, I gave the site a try. It sucked. For half an hour or so, one person after another just clicked next. In that space, there was one person who asked "where u from?" and 2 doodlers. There were at least a dozen people filming themselves masturbating. Using the site was simultaneously revolting and mind-numbing. It would be difficult to get a worse user experience from a website.
- gridspy 17y agoIt doesn't take long to realise that truly random is not what you want - you want somewhat filtered so people who are being disgusting / absurd can do it in their own space.
- kayteeeeee 17y agoYou are sooo cool---Chat Roulette Russian kid --- whoever you are. You are in fact a global peace maker and connector of people-ideas. I was a little revolted of course--like most---at first-but then I started playing my guitar for people and singing and they played back at me and we did songs together. But then of course it all broke down when one of the guys at the singing chat party ran into his bedroom---got a guitar and whipped of his clothes and put a sock on his dick---but you know---it's the thought that counts! kudos to chat roulette my friend from katy in eugene oregon!!
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- morais90 17y agohoneslty...an amazing site would be one were you can do the same video chat as on chatroulette but u could pick at what u are looking for....such a girls/guys who just want to talk ... girls/guys who want some webcaming pleasure... that would be the best site :0 thx