“Russian roulette is not the same without a gun,” sings Lady Gaga in her hit song “Poker Face.” But maybe Lady Gaga hasn’t yet experienced Chat Roulette, a new video-enabled chat room that is the virtual equivalent of the game.

These are some of the tamer faces of Chat Roulette. Users frequently take screen captures of their encounters and post them online, for proof of how ridiculous it can get. (Photo compilation by Stephanie Marcus/CNS)

While users don’t have to worry about the lone bullet, they do risk the chance encounter with what are possibly some of the strangest, most voyeuristic and most obscene people on the Internet. Launched in November 2009—with credit going to Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old programmer who lives in Moscow—Chat Roulette is steadily building an army of curious, mostly young adult, followers.

The premise is simple: Users log on to the site—no user name or password required—and are randomly paired with someone. If either of you doesn’t like how the other looks, or acts, either can press the “next” button, and you’ll see who you are faced with next. And “nexting” happens a lot.

Chat Roulette is like speed dating meets MTV’s “Jackass,” with a little bit of “Girls Gone Wild,” under the helm of the MySpace generation’s seemingly endless and tawdry imagination. In short, it’s the Internet at its most uncensored, at least outside of porn sites. This is the definition of “Not safe for work,” garnering buzz through word of mouth.

That’s the experience of Pippa Letts, whose roommate described the site as a “brilliant form of procrastination or entertainment.” The 20-year-old from Nottingham, England, has used the site only about five times but started a Facebook group with her friends called the New Student Phenomenon: Chat Roulette. The group has close to 700 members and is one of those popping up to recount the bizarre occurrences that take place on Chat Roulette.

If one week’s worth of use is any guide, it’s fair to say that half the people on Chat Roulette are men exposing and fondling themselves, college-age men asking women to flash them or people so strange that they keep people clicking “next,” just to see how depraved it can get. On a Monday evening, clicking “next” meant meeting a shirtless man wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mask and watching a large naked man molest a stuffed raccoon.

This is a common experience, according to Jenny Hobden, 21, who started the Facebook group with Letts. The site amuses Hobden, but the potential for an unexpected peep show makes it “horrible to click on to.”

Neither Hobden nor Letts had used chat rooms before, and while tempted by curiosity, they could be part of a shift back to the traditional chat sessions that were popular in the late 1990s to mid-2000s.

The Internet was once hailed for its ability to share information and promote global conversations. But then came MySpace, Facebook and Twitter—why talk to a stranger when you can talk to your friends?

Social networking and the threat of “stranger danger,” fueled by the horror stories of teens and children lured by pedophiles they met online, marked the demise of the chat room.

In March 2000 the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 28 percent of Americans used online chat rooms; by March 2005 that number had dropped to 17 percent. More recent statistics have not been compiled by Pew because research showed that activity levels remained more or less unchanged compared with other areas like social networking and instant messaging, said its director, Lee Rainie.

“New channels opened up, and people found other ways to connect to people,” Rainie said. “People said there were a lot of nice parts about chat rooms and a lot of parts they found deplorable.”

Rainie said Pew found that women often reported chat rooms to be an unpleasant place because they were hounded for sexually charged conversation.

But could the growing popularity of sites like Chat Roulette signal the return of random chatting?

On Feb. 4, Scott Maney tweeted that Chat Roulette is “one of the greatest, creepiest sites I have ever seen. This is going to be huge.”

Maney is the founder and executive creative director of Jones, an advertising and marketing firm based in Chicago. Like others, he heard about the Web site through a friend and was blown away.

Now, he said, the site is in its infancy. And from what he’s seen, it’s like a new toy that everyone wants to play with. But what strikes Maney is the site’s simplicity.

“It’s so simple, it seems like it could be super-powerful. I love the randomness, but the whole concept is just so simple.”

Maney said it’s a perfect venue for actual online speed dating or a great opportunity for musicians to showcase themselves on a live-feed open-mic show.

This is good news for Carlos Puga, who plans to launch a similar site called Shuffle Chat in the next few weeks. The 35-year-old MTV producer has been developing the site for the past five months. The difference is that his site will have more controls and filters so users aren’t subjected to so much obscenity.

“The filters make sense to me. It means it can appeal to more people,” he said. Chat Roulette “has a college kitsch sense to it. There are drinking games posted online to take a shot every time you see a penis.”

Puga doesn’t want to completely censor his site; he knows that people are attracted to the randomness and lack of accountability, and he plans to offer users more choices. But again, there is money to be made from this technology.

“There is the economic part of it. Most reputable advertisers won’t advertise if there is pornography on the site,” he said.

Word of Chat Roulette’s existence has been steadily growing. Buzz is passed through a fit of giggles and the hard to resist come-on, “Oh, man, you got to check this out.”

According to Ternovskiy, Google Analytics has tracked 4,731,814 unique visitors to his site so far. Ternovskiy, who blogged in November that he was the site’s creator and is listed on Dataopedia as having registered the domain name, was hesitant to publicly take credit for the site. In an interview via Skype, the high school student said that money he’s making from Google AdSense is just enough to cover the site’s expense for now, and he thinks it would be a good thing if he could start to turn a profit.

But British psychologist Graham Jones, who specializes in how people behave online, said that the Web site’s popularity is probably fleeting. According to Jones, research shows that people don’t enjoy talking to strangers online and that “the whole notion that the Internet allows us to connect with strangers is a false one, and it doesn’t really exist.”

Curiosity, he said, will ultimately drive people to the site, but most probably won’t stick around.

Regardless, the numbers are sure to skyrocket with celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton’s Feb. 9 Twitter blitz of his obsession with the site: He invited fellow celebrity tweeters Katy Perry, Kelly Osbourne and Nicole Richie to try to find him.

And even a random celebrity sighting isn’t enough to persuade some users to log on. Peggy Fioretti, 18, a freshman at the University of Illinois, isn’t impressed.

Fioretti used to belong to Stickam, a social-networking site that combines live streaming webcasts with user-created chat rooms and profile pages. It’s an older cousin of the idea behind Chat Roulette.

But Fioretti isn’t wowed with the site even after hearing that a friend supposedly chatted with the Jonas Brothers briefly.

“It’s just creepy,” she said.