Humans and Robots | Part 1: Omegle, China clones & why we think it’s interesting

Since a few days ago we have been playing and researching on Omegle, a chat service that allows 1-on-1 chat between “you” and a “stranger” launched on March 25 this year. Many people have been making fun of it, some think it’s another “next big thing” (see comments on the Omegle Blog). Our friend Leo Wang at Mobile2Venture and We@link (Chinese, registration required) tried to find out how the service got noticed.

We think this service is interesting for (at least) FOUR reasons:

1) Digital Identities & Anonymity
It shows the interest of web users in anonymous services (in addition to AA). Identity both offline and online is a mix of anonymity, nicknames and “real name(s)”. Examine your own life and social circles and you’ll see how you already juggle with identities skillfully.

2) AIs & AAIs
It gives some insight into the future of AIs (how can you be sure you are not chatting with a bot?) and “Artificial Artificial Intelligence” with parallel human processing power on a much larger scale that Wikipedia is doing. Jason Calacanis at Mahalo is working on that too with his Q&A service (inspired by Naver et al. in Korea).

3) China
It got concept-copied (“SHANZHAIed”) twice in China within 3 weeks after launch (the technical entry barrier is obviously not very high – the social / usage barrier might be higher, as we’ve seen so far with the dismal success of Chinese Twitter clones).

• Moluren (陌路人 – “Stranger”) | Launched on April 13, 2009
• Luguode (路过的路过的 – “Passer-by”) | Launched on April 14, 2009

As a side note, a commenter on the Omegle blog says it is very similar to Project Upstream, a project using AIM that has been (apparently) around for years. It is likely the creator of Omegle never heard of it. Will Facebook or Twitter clone Omegle too? Can Omegle be a complement to real name (FB) and nickname (Twitter) services? Will it disappear overnight due to costs the 18y.o. creator cannot absorb? Time will tell.

It will be interesting to see if this service concept will have different destinies in US and China.

4) Our research
It fits very nicely with research we did recently on AIs and robots. They will be published in a series of articles starting with this one.

– By Benjamin, Yiqun, Mihye, Piet & +8* Team

:: Commercial | +8* – Plus Eight Star is the leading cross-market strategic consultancy on Asia’s Mobile & Internet innovations. More about us here and in PDF ::