Chatroulette: Random, Real-Time Interaction
In many ways, 2010 was the year of Chatroulette. This is one of those things where, if you haven’t heard of it, people ask which rock you’ve been under. That said, (the big piece of granite on the corner, yes?) Chatroulette is that site that brings live video streams of complete strangers to your monitor in all their (often naked) glory. The site was created by a 17-year-old kid from Russia and was not only the talk of the town, but spurred a rash of other randomized, real-time websites in its flavor.
In some ways, it’s the site’s teenaged creator that helps put it on this list. Surely, Chatroulette was much-discussed in the past year for many of its members’ transgressions, but the simple fact that a quick bit of coding can bring real-time audio and visual interaction to people across the planet means something when it comes to the real-time Web.
SuperFeedr
SuperFeedr has become of favorite of ReadWriteWeb’s own RSS wizard, Marshall Kirkpatrick, who recently wrote that “if the Web of the future is based on real-time data delivery, San Francisco startup Superfeedr hopes to be a big part of the technology that helps it get there. The company takes content feeds in a wide variety of traditional formats and transforms them into real-time feeds pushed to parties interested in consuming data in real-time.” According to Kirkpatrick, SuperFeedr has assembled a “dream team” of engineers that makes it “all the more important to keep an eye on.”
SuperFeedr’s real-time keyword tracking and location handling are perfect features for the data-driven journalist or the data geek that wants multi-sourced information and wants it now.
Next: One Hot Little iPhone App & The Latest Addition to RWW
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