Why hasn't anyone built a Chatroulette competitor yet? Every post about chatroulette on HN has at least a dozen plausible sounding suggestions for fixing chatroulette (and probably twice as many implausible ones). Why hasn't anyone implemented any of them?
I've seen a ton of them- one that comes to mind is Chatville (ChatVille.com, made by the Digsby team).
I think it's the same answer to the question, "Why hasn't anyone built a Craigslist competitor yet?" The answer is that they have. However, nobody cares.
Interesting. I can see why Craigslists competitors haven't caught on. The incentive for both buyers and sellers is to go to the site with the most users. But I wouldn't have thought the network effect would be nearly as strong for a ChatRoulette competitor.
I've found that, as a general rule, if you're tempted to ask, "Why hasn't anybody thought of this yet?" you're too late. I was frustrated the other day as I was reading in the newspaper about yet another non-tech-origins group filing for patents on old ideas with new technology (in this case, using a Wiimote to control the playback of a MIDI score). Naturally, the "inventors" were wondering why nobody'd ever done that before, and yet solo performers and Arduino-type digital artists have been using various types of sensors to do the same thing for quite a while.
