While Chatroulette is suffering from growing pains with some unplanned downtime, Woome has registered the domain name and launched ShufflePeople to pick up some of the slack.
Dating sites spend millions of dollars to get the amount of users that Chatroulette has acquired in a few months. Chatroulette goes down, and ShufflePeople steps in to deliver a similar service in the meantime. This is how the adult website market works, except they throw up new sites the next day to capitalize on something the competition is doing, or not doing.
The spiral of copycat innovation spins faster and faster. Some 17-year old kid has created the meme of 1Q2010 and now myriad companies are coming in to copy him and take a slice of the pie. Pretty soon AOL will start a similar site and we’ll move on to something else because Chatroulette was so last month. But for now, there is nothing bigger or more hyped.
Plenty of companies out there doing video dating wrong. Maybe, just maybe, a dating site will get it right after they deconstruct what Chatroulette is doing right. Lessons to be learned here people. Video is going to change online dating someday, but we’re nowhere near figuring out how it needs to work. I think I have, but it takes a new way of doing things and change is hard, especially in the online dating industry, which is still running on marketing strategies from a decade ago for the most part. Contact me if you’re in the mood to change the game.
Props to @Jonathan360 for the sleuthing. I received some Tweets from WooMe peeps but they failed to mention it was their site (marketing FAIL). Customized Fail Whale c/o Twitter. More at LA Snark.
