Browsing for a browser

If graphical browsers were actual people, the oldest of them wouldn’t be old enough to legally drink, at least not yet. NCSA Mosiac, which grew into Netscape and almost in parallel into Microsoft Internet Explorer is a bit over seventeen years old. In technology terms that’s actually quite well aged, and browsers have evolved significantly over that time. We’ve seen Netscape rise and fall, Internet Explorer take a market dominating position only to lose significant share to Mozilla Firefox and to a lesser extent Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera’s browsers.

Browser choice is a bit like choosing “your” brand of car. There’s a lot of attachment to whatever you’re used to, and getting out of the habit of just clicking on the same icon every time you want to check out the Web can be tough. It’s a worthwhile task, however, as the feature set of each browser can be surprisingly different. It can also reveal some interesting things you may not have considered about how and why you browse. Given that all of the major browsers are free and generally they’re not huge downloads, there’s no implicit reason why you can’t have multiple browsers installed.

It’s very much a personal taste test kind of thing. I try to switch browsers every once in a while if only to stay current with the market, but that’s not something you particularly need to worry about. What can be worth considering are the individual features that each browser offers.

Microsoft often throws some interesting tech ideas into each new release of Internet Explorer, although I’ve got to admit I don’t use it all that much. That’s more to do with doing most of my writing work on a Mac, however. Microsoft abandoned IE for Mac with version 5, whereas the current PC version is IE 8. Even Microsoft doesn’t recommend anyone use older versions of IE for security reasons, but when I am working on a PC I give IE a spin to see what’s fresh and new. As a Mac user you might expect I’d use Safari, but beyond its Top Sites splash screen — very handy if you repeatedly visit the same sets of Web sites — I’ve never found it that compelling. Likewise Opera, although the company’s mobile versions of its product do run well on smartphone platforms such as Blackberry and surprisingly even Apple’s iPhone.

Firefox is beloved by many for its extensibility. Some of its features are a little silly, like the Persona themes introduced in the most recent version, but other extensions are distinctly handy. Google’s Chrome is fast catching up to Firefox in the extensions stakes, and at the time of writing is my browser of choice simply because it’s so particularly fast.

That could change. Despite the browser being “free”, the browser wars are far from over. Thankfully, the casualties are usually just code, and the cost of entering this particular war only involve a little bit of download time.

NBN alternatives

There’s been a lot of recent press surrounding the first folks to be connected to the National Broadband Network. I’m not entirely sure that it can be called “National” when there’s only a few connected users to date, but that’s splitting hairs. Unless you happen to be in just a few spots in Tasmania (or shortly a few more in mainland Australia), the chances are you’re more than a year or two away from being able to access NBN services.

So what do you do in the meantime?

For a (thankfully) decreasing number of users, dialup still remains the only method of internet access. They’re the communities that will benefit most from the NBN. The problem with dialup used to be speed, and it still is, but in a different way than a decade ago. Ten years ago, Dialup was common and web pages and Internet services were formatted with dialup users in mind. Today’s web pages and applications pretty much all presume you’re on some kind of broadband, and dialup won’t cut it for much more than very simple email checking.

What then of broadband? Here you split into several choices of broadband, dictated largely by where you actually are. Satellite broadband services (and associated technologies such as WiMAX) do cover some small (and mostly remote) pockets of Australia. Cable-based Internet speeds have increased in recent years on some services, but they’re still highly limited based on whether or not your home or business was a beneficiary of the cable rollouts of the mid 1990s, and the lack of price competition

For most people, broadband equals ADSL or ADSL2+ if you’re near enough to an ADSL2+ exchange. There’s been little to no movement in value in the ADSL space for years, as most of the hardware is Telstra-owned, even if it’s resold by other vendors. In the ADSL2+ space, there’s more competition, and as such a lot better value on offer — again if you’re near enough to an ADSL2+ exchange.

ADSL/ADSL2+ might be a bit stagnant in terms of the deals getting better, but where there’s a lot of movement in the consumer broadband space currently is mobile broadband. Traditionally, using mobile broadband was a lot like playing Russian Roulette with the contents of your wallet. Unless you were exceptionally careful about how, when and where you connected, your mobile broadband bill could quickly inflate to catastrophic bill shock dimensions.

That’s changed very rapidly in recent months, with a lot of pre-paid options giving you 1GB of data for as little as $15 per month. That kind of data rate makes some low-speed ADSL options a little obsolete, especially when you consider that your mobile broadband is indeed mobile. Coverage can still be an issue depending on where you are, but it’s improving. On a recent road trip between Sydney and Adelaide, I tested a Telstra microSIM in an iPad on the road between Hay and Balranald. For those who haven’t done that particular run, describing it as the middle of nowhere is pretty apt. At the time I was in the car — I should note that I wasn’t driving and web browsing at the same time — there were few other users on that stretch of track. The mobile broadband speeds I got were better than my home ADSL2+ connection.

That’s mildly annoying, and admittedly I’m not going to move to the middle of the Hay plain just in order to get faster broadband. Still, it does point to a genuine improvement in mobile broadband access that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Can Networking be made easy?

Most — not quite all, but almost all — of the home broadband connections sold in Australia come with a network attached. I’m not talking here of the internet that you pay money for and connect to, but the wired/wireless network delivered by a router of some sort. It’s certainly possible to set up a broadband connection using only a modem, but they’re becoming increasingly rare in the marketplace. Most ISPs push the router option over a simple modem if you’re buying from them, and even store shelves are stacked high with combination modem-routers, with a tiny section at the bottom for the basic modem models.

From one perspective, this makes a lot of sense. A router acts like a digital post office, sending your internet connection to any computer (or other device) you’d care to share your internet connection and files with. There are some pretty well known problems with security — especially wireless security — with routers, but there’s a bigger and more fundamental problem. Most routers can be utter torture just to get up and running.

I was recently at the launch of a new range of Belkin routers where the company revealed some of its support statistics. Belkin, like most vendors, offers two different ways to set up one of its routers. Those with plenty of networking knowledge can dive right into the web-based interface, tweaking MTU, VPI and PPPoE settings to their heart’s content. That’s not most folks, however. Most people will opt for the installation CD provided with the router, hoping that the automated setup wizard will step them easily through getting the router working.

Quite how many fail is rather eye opening. Only 10% of those who buy a router, according to Belkin, will get it working without having to call tech support, and even those folks have to interact with the router some 45 times — presumably that’s a lot of button clicking and password entry — before things are up and running. That’s a lot of stress in an area that few people are all that au fait with, really. I’m in a position where I do know my way around a router, but to put it in a context for myself, if I had to interact with my car 45 times before I could get it started, I’d give up and take the bus every time. And I really don’t like the bus much.

There’s a certain undeniable extent to which networking can’t be made easy when and if things go wrong, as there’s a lot of failure points to deal with. One solution would be to go for a product that’s either pre-configured by your ISP, which often comes with the extra dangling carrot of being “free”, or at least rather cheap. You can’t get something for nothing, however, as most of the models sold this way are locked to a single ISP, and they’re not always optimally configured in terms of wireless security in any case. Change ISPs, and you’d have to wastefully get an entirely new router, or pay a penalty fee for “unlocking” your own property. This isn’t always the case, so be sure to check carefully upfront.

Privacy online: A quick primer

One of the ongoing themes of the Internet age has been the question of privacy, and how to maintain it in an increasingly online world. It’s something that’s come to the fore recently with a lot of concern over the way that Facebook uses and utilises the data put into it, whether it’s simply making those details public for the world to see, or selling complex analytical information on to advertisers. It’s driven some people to deliberately abandon Facebook altogether, although undeniably not quite as many as the protest movement might have liked.

Online privacy is a complex and undoubtedly touchy subject, if only because it means different things to different people. An eight year old’s understanding of privacy is quite different to an eighteen year old’s, and even more removed from that of an eighty year old’s, for that matter. Some folk are naturally extroverted, while others sit at home frantically wrapping tin foil round and round their skulls.

There are a few basic things that you should keep in mind in terms of online privacy, however.

1) Your private information is valuable

I’m not just talking credit card numbers or your mother’s maiden name here. As an example, If you’ve used social media platform Twitter and ever mentioned a hot topic — be it iPads, Justin Bieber or Arab-Israeli politics — chances are you’ll pick up a whole bunch of “interesting” followers. You might not think it, but the things you choose to chat about online reveal plenty of private information about you. Automated Twitter followers are just the thin end of the wedge. Advertisers love knowing more about you, because it allows them to send more targeted ads. Targeted ads are more likely to result in sales, which means money. Hence, your private information is valuable, and not just to you.

2) If you don’t put it up there, it’s not going up there (maybe)

This is one of those obvious-in-hindsight things. You can’t stop your house being in public view, but you can pull the curtains to stop folks peering in through the curtains. The same is true online. If you don’t post pictures to Facebook of the company party, then they’re less likely to go up there. I say less likely, because you might not be the only one with a camera, and if you share the shots someone else might get that bright idea. As such, sensitive information (whatever it might be) should be shared with the implicit understanding that you want it to remain private.

3) The Internet is forever

Just like that awesome tattoo of Guns N Roses that you figured was a great idea to get embedded on your forehead at age 18, really. Often, it’s just as “good” an idea as the tattoo might have been, but the consequences will last long beyond your initial interest in most cases.  As plenty of public figures and companies have discovered, once it’s online, chances are if there’s interest in it, it’s staying up there — somewhere. There are legal remedies for issues such as libel, but even those create a virtual paper trail drawing attention to the issue involved.

4) Keep yourself safe and secure

A well trodden path here, but one that crops up over and over again. The Internet can be great for meeting new folks, but don’t lose sight of common sense. Just as it can be used to maintain privacy, it can also be used to create a false facade. As cartoonist Peter Steiner put it all the way back in 1993, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you’re_a_dog). Or a con artist, or worse. In financial matters, this means making sure any site that asks for financial or personal information is secured. Look at least for a padlock symbol in the address bar or bottom of Web pages, keep anti-virus software up to date, and do a quick Google search for the company name before committing any funds. Adding the qualifier “sucks” (or similar) may bring up customer complaints. Too many complaints? Find another online store.

For personal interactions it’s even more vital to stay safe. Not everyone online is out to get you, certainly, but some sensible actions when meeting online “friends” in real life should include only meeting in public places, and preferably in the company of an actual friend of your own. It may create some initial social awkwardness, but it beats many of the sad alternatives.

What is the Net good for, exactly?

Just writing that headline alone gave me terrible flashbacks to a Sandra Bullock 90’s thriller that I’m sure would seem horribly dated (although in some ways possibly prescient). Living more in the now, though, debate continues to rage around the potential implementation of the National Broadband Network, whether there’s enough broadband for everyone anyway, and exactly how much it should cost.

With that in mind, my ears pricked up recently when attending a product launch for networking firm Netgear. To kick things off, representatives showed off survey figures that outlined the current home usage patterns of the Internet across all users. There’s some interesting figures that show what we use the Net for from home locations.

It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that Web and Email use tops the list, with 90% of respondents using both services. An NBN isn’t likely to change the usage there, although it would enable larger files to be sent via email or viewed via the web with more ease.

51% of respondents used social networking, and I suspect that’s a figure that’s only going to rise. If you strip out the formal business requirements of email, there’s a lot of messages sent that are better suited to social networking sites and services, and that’s even without taking into consideration professional social networks such as LinkedIn.

46% of respondents use the internet to download music and video. There wasn’t a breakout for those doing so legally or illegally, although that’s hardly surprising. Nobody’s likely to dob themselves in on a survey. Obviously a faster broadband infrastructure would enable this to run faster, but it could also serve in the fight against copyright infringement nicely. As Apple proved with iTunes, once you can deliver customers fair quality content quickly and at a good price, the market will follow.

45% of those surveyed used the Net to work from home. That’s a big area where a faster broadband infrastructure could have huge implications for how we all live our lives. Not every job can be taken online, but the facility to quickly and seamlessly access work from home, or telework entirely could be exceptionally useful. Then again, it could lead to a nation of overworked employees.

An equal 45% used the net to watch movies, TV or video. That’s distinct from the downloaders. These are folks watching YouTube and its many imitators. Again, the NBN case here is pretty obvious, and even has employment implications. Once you can stream good quality video anywhere across the nation, if you’ve got a great idea for a TV program, who needs the free to air networks any more?

The rest of the figures skew a little lower — 34% for instant messaging chat, 30% for internet radio and 23% for gaming. One figure that did surprise me a little was that only 24% of respondents used internet access from home for webcam or voice over IP services. Considering the convenience and cost savings that services like Skype offer, it’s interesting that the takeup is comparatively low.

There’s dozens of usage scenarios beyond home usage that an NBN could address, but rather like putting today’s broadband up against the first 400kbps connections I ever used, it’s tough to entirely visualise them. Telemedicine is an often chosen target, but there’s plenty of scope for other uses, both professional and personal. I reckon it’ll be very interesting to revisit those figures in a decade’s time. What will we be  using the broadband of the future (no matter what form it takes) for then?

Do you want more TV advertising, even if it’s Google?

Mid-May, Google announced a whole bunch of new products and services at its Google I/O event in San Francisco. The biggest surprise of the bunch was Google TV, a platform that Google’s developing to bring the richness of the Web to your TV.

This has of course been tried before for a vast number of years, but when Google talks, people tend to listen. The company is packed with clever and committed developers, and more than a small quantity of spare change to throw at its projects. It also doesn’t hurt that Google has a lot of goodwill amongst all of its clients. For the average consumer, Google’s products work well and are mostly free.

Free’s a nice price to pay, but it ignored a key element of how Google makes money and pays for that “free”, and that’s through targeted advertising. Every Google search is logged and analysed, and if you’re a user of Google’s excellent mail client, gmail, you’ll notice more specific ads turning up next to your mail as well. This does worry some privacy advocates, but it’s clearly the price one pays for free services. If you want it free, you pay with ads. It’s the model (more or less) that television (with the exception of state-run services such as the ABC) has worked on for more than half a century.

Bringing more ads to TV, though? That’s an interesting prospect, given one of the first things that most buyers of personal video recorders do is work out the best way to enable ad-skipping, whether that’s just fast-forwarding through the ads (a limitation of any “Freeview” branded PVR) or skipping them entirely. GoogleTV will be a combination of a hardware product and a software platform. At first in the US this year Google will launch a set top box built by Logitech, and Blu-Ray player and TV built by Sony with inbuilt Google TV. As yet, international plans (including Australia) point to 2011 as the earliest we might see GoogleTV here.

Google’s main product is still of course search, and the ability to search for TV-specific content easily from your sofa is pretty compelling. I put the question around ad-skipping and how to sell consumers on getting yet another box to chuck under the TV that’ll serve ads to them to Google’s product manager for Google TV, Rishi Chandra at a recent Google event. His response was rather telling about where Google’s priorities actually are.

Chandra’s take on advertising for end users (that’s you and me and everyone else presumably watching a Google TV) is that we’d prefer targeted advertising specific to our searches and our profiles. They’re more useful, he told me, and if the economics are right and they’re particularly targeted we may end up with less of them.

On the other side of the coin, while it’s possible to strip ads out of Web pages if you’re so inclined or fast forward the ads on the TV if you’ve pre-recorded it, don’t look for that kind of feature in Google TV. One of the benefits (to the advertisers) that Chandra highlighted was that users couldn’t skip the ads. They could ensure that the ads were played and were trackable. Google can help the advertising community with lots more specific data via Google TV. At the end of the day, Google’s actual clients are the advertisers that give the company cash by the barrowload.

It’s a difficult line that Google has to tread. Its money comes from advertising, and even online there’s no such thing as a free lunch. It still leaves me wondering if it’s going to be worth investing in a TV with inbuilt Google (or a set top box, Blu-Ray player or whatever) in order to be served even more advertising that I can’t easily ignore.

The future of TV is nearly here, but it won’t be “free”

Chances are reasonably good that you’re a pay TV subscriber, or know someone who is. If you’re not, the odds are pretty high you’ve invested in a digital set top box (or digital ready TV). The bad old days of 1-5 channels (depending on where you live) are truly behind us. Meanwhile, both free to air and pay TV are gearing up for the next “big thing”. It’s not digital TV as the Freeview ads would have you believe it, but instead direct TV delivery over the Internet, sometimes referred to as IPTV.

You can already get a taste of how IPTV could work through services like Channel 7’s Plus7, Channel 9’s Fixplay, Foxtel’s Downloads and ABC TV’s iView platforms. They’re not even limited to your internet-connected computer, with several TV makers offering Channel 7 options, and ABC’s iView available through the Playstation 3 console. Fire up a web browser and go to the relevant site and a wealth of Internet-delivered TV goodies are yours for the viewing.

There’s a couple of minor catches with these approaches. First of all, they play pretty much exclusively in the “catch up” space. Most of them work off time limited availability of recently run programs. Great if you’ve missed the last episode of 24, but only within a week or two. Some older programs are available on a consistent basis, but the quality varies. Not so much the quality of the programs, as tastes may vary, but the quality of the encoding used to convert them. Sitting down with Channel 7’s Plus7 to enjoy an episode or two of the genuinely classic Father Ted, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of blockiness and digital artefacts making the experience a lot less compelling than it should be.

There are solutions on the horizon that may fix the “Catch Up” nature of these services. A company called FetchTV is promising up to 20 channels and a video on demand service over the Internet to be launching this year. iiNet’s already signed up to deliver the service, which is expected to cost “under $30″ per month. $30 per month might sound like a lot for Internet-delivered TV, and they’ll certainly have to iron out quality and speed of delivery issues, especially with the woeful speeds that many Australians have to suffer through.

The big issue with IPTV is that you’re likely to be paying for it either way. iiNet’s said that they won’t count FetchTV content against a user’s data cap, but then they’ll be getting $30 (or more) of your hard earned cash upfront.  A handful of ISPs (including Internode, iPrimus, Adam and iiNet) offer iView unmetered, but it’s really the exception rather than the rule. For everyone else’s services, you’ll pay in the form of your data allowance. A typical program may chew up hundreds of megabytes of download allowance, but as they’re really streaming rather than downloading, you’ll be using up that data without being able to easily re-watch downloads at a later date. If you’re on a plan that charges for excess data, that could get expensive fast, and even those on capped plans that drop speed may find a large part of their month’s service at crawling rates if they get too keen on Desperate Housewives.

Can you get ISP satisfaction?

Internet connectivity is everywhere you look, from PCs to smart phones to games consoles, whether it’s delivered over cables, phone lines or even wirelessly. For most of us, we don’t really think about our Internet Service Provider (ISP) except in two key areas. Firstly, there’s the time when we’ve got to pay the bill, although with bundling and direct debits quite normal for most ISPs you may never even think about that. Competition is still fierce and the price of both wireless and fixed line broadband services still continues to tumble on a per-gigabyte basis.

The other time, of course, is when things go wrong. When your connection is slow, flaky, or worst of all inexplicably “down”, you’re going to want to know why, and fast. Quite how your ISP responds (if they respond at all) will form a big part of how you relate to them, as beyond picking your plan details, it’s the primary time that you do relate to them at all. If the support person has an impenetrable accent, a poor line connection, baffles you with jargon or rigidly sticks to a support script that doesn’t help you in the least, it can quickly get annoying.

A recent Roy Morgan poll of ISP Satisfaction ratings reveals some interesting figures.  Overall, ISPs must be getting something right. In the six month period from July to December 2009, 73.3% of surveyed customers were at least “satisfied”. Of those, 43.7 were “Fairly Satisfied” and 29.6%” were “Very Satisfied”. Breaking it out into the actual providers reveals a lot more detail. Internode (90.3% satisfied) and iiNet (86.8%) customers seemed happiest with their service.

The wooden spoons — those ISPs whose customers fell below the 73.3% industry average — fared worse. Amongst the major players, these included dodo (66.9%), Telstra BigPond (66.1%) and iPrimus (65.1%). The interesting thing there is the gap between the the bottom rung and top rung, which Roy Morgan notes is higher than in other service industries. In other words, where you might expect a small gap between ISPs depending on how cranky given customers were, it’s odd that it’s this large. Either the good guys are exceptionally good, or the bad guys are doing particularly poorly. Telstra’s a particularly interesting case, as they’ve still got the lion’s share of the overall market. Are Telstra customers more irritable with some facet of their service, or does the number of customers give rise to a higher level of “squeaky wheel” dissatisfaction?

So what can an ISP do to “improve” customer satisfaction, given that in an ideal world, the only time you’d even notice your ISP is if they improved your service?

How safe is your data?

These days our PCs are much more than just computers, they’re our life. Most of, if not all, the important information in our life is now stored electronically on a computer. Whether it’s those precious family photos, that beloved music collection or critical business documents and financial records, everything is digital. Hardware failure, a virus, fire, theft, a power surge, or even a disgruntled employee and you could be left with all of your data gone forever. The possibilities of how it can happen are endless (trust us we’ve seen them all) and we can only guarantee one thing – all hard drives will fail, often without any warning whatsoever. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s simple to address.

Geeks2U is proud to announce the launch of GeekVault, a secure, affordable, set and forget online data backup service. GeekVault came about after Geeks2U technicians became increasingly distressed with being called out to thousands of jobs a year where their valued customers had lost crucial personal and business data and it was either irretrievable or the cost of recovery was uneconomical. Our Geeks demanded a better way to do things and so we developed GeekVault.

Why GeekVault?

1. LOCAL: We backup your data to a leading Australian data centre so it’s never far away.
2. SECURE: Data is encrypted using 256 bit AES “bank grade” encryption before it even leaves your computer and is then sent via a secure 128 bit encrypted SSL link.
3. FAIL-SAFE: All backups are securely replicated across our network of data centres spanning the globe. All of these data centres are “bank-grade” with only the best security, uninterrupted power sources, dedicated internet connections and climate control.
4. LIVE: LiveProtect™ offers constant and continuous protection – whenever a file is changed, it’s backed up.
5. LIGHT: Minimal bandwidth usage – only the incremental change to a file is backed up, not the whole file, minimising your internet usage.
6. SAFE: Safest form of backup – unlike a local backup, your data is not susceptible to fire, theft or the many other risks of storing your backups locally.
7. SET IT. FORGET IT: Gone are the days of having to remember to regularly perform that backup which you know is so important but seldom bother to do. Once setup, GeekVault simply charges your credit card once a month for as long as you wish to use the service (there is no minimum contract) all the while fiercely protecting your data. Every photo, every email, every document, all safe with GeekVault.
8. ONLINE: Access files anytime, anywhere – all you need is an internet connection. Enjoy one click file & folder sharing. Share your files with anyone with an email address.
9. SHARE: Utilise your plan’s data allowance across as many PCs as you like rather than having to sign up each computer to a separate account.
10. ROLL-BACK: GeekVault keeps an unlimited version history of every one of your files allowing you to roll-back to any past version at any time. Best of all, we keep these for you for free without using any of your data allowance.

Sign up now for as little as $9.95 a month and never have to worry about your data again. It’s a tiny price to pay for huge peace of mind!

Find out more

Next Craze for Social Networking: Chatroulette

Even though the Internet has existed for some ten years now (in it’s present form) and has a fair amount of order and regulation, it is still somewhat of a wild frontier. As vast as the Internet is and the wide array of things that can be found on there, there is still room for new ideas and new trends. Just when you think that you have seen it all, another unique idea comes to the surface. Web ideas although often very simple, can often take the Internet world by storm. This is definitely true with the web site that I am exploring this month. The idea for this web site is fun, it’s unique and it’s curious… and it is called Chatroulette.

The Chatroulette web site is fairly new and can only be described as social networking with a new twist or ‘spin’ (pun intended). Chatroulette.com is a video chat web site where users enter the web site to chat with others. People visit the web site from all over the world and are randomly paired in a video chat with another user. This probably all sounds simple enough, until you add people. The users of this web site have given the web site its own momentum and have taken it in a direction that the developer probably never imagined.

Once you enter into a chat with someone on Chatroulette, you can talk freely. However no information is given to you about the other person. Therefore the things you learn about them will only come from the conversation you manage to have. What makes things interesting is that the conversation can be terminated at any time by either of the users. Users simply click the ‘next’ button to be moved on to a new conversation with a completely different random user. A conversation can end for any number of reasons. In many ways, this feature alone puts the pressure on to keep things interesting.

Surprisingly, Chatroulette was developed by a seventeen year old boy from Russia. He came up with the idea and he actually programmed the web site himself. The web site is developed in a very simple way and it is also run very simply. Although there are warnings on the web site about keeping things decent, no rules are actually enforced. This means that many inappropriate things take place on the site. Users have complained that on average one in every ten chats contain content that is not appropriate for children. Therefore it is definitely not a web site for children to play around on.

As for the future of Chatroulette, it is currently very low on features. However the owner is said to have received proposals from investors that want to plump it up and expand on the idea it is also spawning the resurgence of web video conferencing. Watch this space…

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