A Social Media innovation worth Google Buzz

The Net buzz is about Google Buzz, which launched this week. It’s an important product, another turning point in the development of Social Media, no doubt. But it’s a week in which we were also reminded that game-changing ideas aren’t the sole province of big companies with legions of brillantly smart people.

The New York Times discovered that Chatroulette, a site that connects you randomly to a Webcam user and has rapidly grown in popularity worldwide (often hosting 20,000 users at time at night) was developed by a 17-year-old … in Moscow.

Surprised?

I created this project for fun. Initially, I had no business goals with
it. I created this project recently. I was and still am a teenager
myself, that is why I had a certain feeling of what other teenagers
would want to see on the Internet. I myself enjoyed talking to friends
with Skype using a microphone and webcam. But we got tired of talking
to each other eventually. So I decided to create a little site for me
and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people.

— Andrey Ternovskiy, developer of Chatroulette.

(via venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who said: “I think we’ll reach out to Andrey and offer him a visit to NYC. I’m
still not sure if this is something we should invest it, but I’d sure
like to meet this guy.”)