Chatroulette the latest way to meet strangers online

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Times Union | Apr 1 2010

Larry Weintraub spoke with the TImes Union about the relatively new Chat Roulette craze. He mentioned that like all social media, there are things to watch out for.

Chatroulette was started in November by a 17-year-old in Russia, but about half of all Chatroulette spins connect you with someone from the United States, according to the Camden, N.J.-based database research firm RJMetrics.

Chatroulette is popular enough to have spawned an offshoot, FaceRoulette, which is linked to your Facebook account. FaceRoulette is less popular here because it doesn't allow you to be anonymous.

...Frazier estimates that 60 percent of what she comes across is pornographic. Larry Weintraub, the CEO of FanScape, a digital marketing agency based in Los Angeles that extensively studies social media, agrees with that number. So does Elizabeth Burgess Dowdell, an associate professor at the College of Nursing at Villanova University who specializes in child Internet safety.

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