Denuo - denuology.com

Oh, digital evolution. You surprise me every day. Today, you brought to my attention this little gem of a website called OMEGLE.COM, an online chat service that lets you talk to strangers. Forget Facebook and Myspace, which only let you communicate with people you might actually know in real life. This is the new digital hotness right here: total anonymity and an open forum for saying whatever you want to a total stranger.

However, the benefit of this site goes far beyond its intended purpose of being “a brand-new service for meeting new friends.” With my first few forays into chatting on this site, I don’t think I would be friends with anyone I’ve met on here. Hell, I’m downright frightened by some of these folks. No, this web gem is living proof of one of my favorite modern theorems ever created, via the geniuses over at Penny Arcade, and is a prime example of everything that’s right and wrong with The Internet.

The theory is summarized in this now-classic comic strip from Holkins and Krahulik and pretty much speaks for itself.

Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory stemmed off of your typical session on Xbox Live, where any hour of any day, you could connect with gamers to hear a wide variety of verbal abuse, be it racial, sexual, or a heady combination of both. However, this applies to almost any situation in which you can hide behind a screen of ones and zeroes. Blog comments are a nice example of this, but moderation and screening has stemmed it somewhat. Facebook and Twitter place anonymity safeguards in the form of permissions, allowing the user to throw open or close shut the firehose of abuse he/she can receive.

But Omegle throws these chains off, letting freak flags fly in a petri dish of Greater Internet Fuckwad Labs. One can literally begin and end a conversation with anything they like. You’re encouraged to say, “Hi” by the site’s friendly banner, but I don’t think I’ve seen that happen once. So far, it’s been references to sex organs, sex acts, questions about my sexual orientation, and a line of numbers counting up to 10. I think the numbers scared me most of all.

The Internet contains a lot of concepts that have much different outcomes than intented and Omegle is a testament to this. As a service to make friends, this ranks with walking up to a complete stranger and slapping them. As an entertainment device that only the Internet can offer, it ranks very high on the list. Expect competitions on this website in the future based around Omegle, including who can have the longest chat, who can have the funniest chat, and who can get the most amount of people to quit out of the chat in a set time frame without being vulgar or rude (Protip: ).