Omegle

Omegle was launched when I was 18 years old, still living with my parents in Vermont. It was meant to offer a form of social spontaneity that felt new and exciting at the time. When you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. The premise was that "meeting new people" could be achieved in its most basic form. Building on what I saw as the intrinsic safety benefits of the Internet, users were anonymous to each other by default. This made chats more self-contained, reducing the likelihood of a malicious person being able to track someone down after their chat ended. At first, it was unclear if anyone would even care about such a site. However, Omegle quickly gained popularity almost instantly upon launch and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: "If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door."