chatroulette

RandTxt Brings Random Chats With Strangers to Your iPhone

Frederic Lardinois

28 Apr 2011 — 1 min read

One of last year’s hottest company’s of 2009 was Aardvark – the mobile Q&A service that Google acquired in early 2010. Aardvark routes your questions to the most appropriate person in your expanded social network and ensures that you get the highest quality answer possible. RandTxt (iTunes link) is the exact opposite of this. With this service, which launched its free iPhone version today, your questions, comments or obscene observations are routed to a random user on RandTxt’s network.

RandTxt’s SMS and web-based service launched a few weeks ago, but because of the high cost of sending text messages, users were limited to two questions per day. The iPhone app, which doesn’t rely on text messages, does not have any of these limitations.

James Tamplin, the app’s developer, describes RandTxt as a “Chatroulette for text messages.” That’s an apt description. Think of it as a poor man’s Yobongo, where the complicated location-based algorithms are replaced with a random number generator. Is it useful? Probably not – but if you’re looking for a fun way to spend two minutes at the checkout counter, you could do a lot worse (obscene comments, by the way, will get you banned).

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