Social Media for Social Change

A random walk in the commons

Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 6:13 pm by Nick in research | 2 Comments

On March 25th, Leif K-Brooks, a high school student, launched a whole new way to chat: Omegle.

Omegle is as simple as it gets. You go to the site, click “Start a chat” and you’re connected to another random user. There’s no screen names or other identifiers beyond “You” and “Stranger” and the only controls are a “Send” and “Disconnect” button.

So far, with a random (how could it not be?) sample of users, there seem to be a wide range of users in terms of age, location and language.

This is a commons of sorts - and the most interesting thing to me so far is how short most conversations are. I’m noticing that people don’t really know what to say when faced with a stranger, no context, and no subject to discuss. I’ve found the questions that we use in our postcards with the Red Phone calls to Iran helpful in getting things started, but even then, the conversations generally devolve into things like “so, how did you find out about this Omegle thing?”

But what do we talk about in a commons where we don’t have anything in common to start the conversation? Is there some intrinsic value in a commons that is completely random? 

There has been one conversation that I’ve had that lasted more than a few minutes, and it was based around something we had in common: we both found Omegle through Reddit. From there, we discussed what the value of this random interaction system was. But if the technology is the only thing we’re talking about, we’re not really making any sort of change in the real world. Ideally, In real life conversations, people use the things they have in common to find other things to discuss, but that didn’t wind up happening for me. Maybe it does for other users? Or maybe this is an example of a tool that we haven’t figured out how to use - one that will evolve into something that isn’t obvious. I suspect that adding just a little more information or another rule would help get conversations moving - an indicator of location or some other piece of information about the Stranger you’re chatting with might make it more likely that you would have the spark of a conversation that would lead to more interesting interactions. 

If nothing else, it provides an interesting testing ground for how people interact through technology.

2 Responses to “A random walk in the commons”

1. # On April 3rd, 2009 at 7:50 am Steven K-Brooks wrote:

   Thanks for the comment about my son’s website.

   A few of the conversation that I have had were promising but seemed not to develop. One conversation which was getting interesting “imploded” causing it to disconnect (according to the prompt but I don’t know what ‘imploded” means).

   Some of the users seemed shocked to find out that I am 63, which apparently is ancient. A lot of the users disconnect suddenly for no apparent reason without even saying goodbye. I am surprised at the number of people who use the site and wonder what attracts them to it.
   Steven K-Brooks
   Brattleboro, Vermont

2. # On April 6th, 2009 at 6:40 pm Jeremy wrote:

   Really interesting find, Nick. As we discussed this weekend, I wonder how we might incorporate a similar chat tool that allowed more than two strangers to attempt a conversation (perhaps 4 or 5). Our experiment this coming weekend will connect strangers together in a group chat, but what is interesting about Omegle are the random combinations of discussants and the spontaneity, which is very much like public life. I could envision the basic framework of Omegle iterated with different sets of rules and constraints to test some of our proposals for the SMSC project.