Napster Founder Tasked with Cleaning up Chatroulette

Posted 06/14/2010 at 6:32am | by Paul Lilly

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Have you been in a coma for nearly the past year? If so, then you probably haven't subjected yourself to Chat Roulette, which is...um, a sort of social networking site if being particularly generous with our description. It's really an online site where you go to hook up with random strangers for webcam-based chat, and what could possibly go wrong, right?

If you've never been to Chatrourellete.com (NSFW), it should take you all but 10 seconds to figure out the answer to that question (Spoiler: it involves dudes waving around their manhood). That's not to say there isn't potential for Chat Roulette to be something more, and with more than a million people a day visiting the site, investors have begun to take notice. But for advertisers to jump on board, somebody needs to clean things up.

That somebody is Shawn Fanning, who you might recognize as the founder of Napster. Chat Roulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy has been in informal discussions with Fanning on ways to change the direction of Chat Roulette. One solution being yanked around is adding software designed to scan video to determine whether or not a user is exposing himself.

"I'm fascinated by Chat Roulette and Andrey," Fanning told TechCrunch. "I want to help him any way I can."

The question is, will he be able to? An even better question, when will we see more awesome Chat Roulette Piano Improve videos (NSFW - language)?