If you consider Twitter to be vital to the global conversation, you probably won't love Omegle.

Omegle uses a primitive interface to pair its users with strangers to chat anonymously, trumping the simplicity and ease of Twitter and its older social networking counterparts

Created by 18-year old named Leif K-Brooks, it almost feels like an ironic homage to the earliest days of social networking in its similarly to AOL Chat Rooms or conversations with the smartbot Smarter Child. After an endless series of rapid-fire feature upgrades implemented on sites like Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube over the past several years, has social networking come full circle? Are we going back to basics?

Probably not. While K-Brooks wrote that within five days, he’d seen extraordinary growth in the number of users on Omegle, it’s unlikely that the site will take off a la Twitter. Omegle is extremely prone to trolling, its internationally varied users often must traverse awkward language and age barriers, and most people aren’t exactly keen on the idea of establishing personal or business contacts with anonymous e-chat buddies. Most users probably mess around on the site for a few minutes before ultimately becoming bored, frustrated, or weirded out, and then log into their Facebook or Gmail accounts.

The anonymity factor leaves Omegle lacking in the personal branding department – users have no identity on the site to separate them from the 3,000 or so others who are simply branded with the moniker “Stranger.” Your mother’s worst nightmare. This is the draw and the drawback, and the reason why Omegle will likely remain a fleeting and temporarily amusing e-fad before settling into the Web graveyard.

HowStuffWorks tech blogger Jonathan Strickland wrote about his Omegle dabbling, summing up the experience by explaining that, “Civility went out the window with conversation number four, but a 75-percent success rate is nothing to sneeze at. It’s an interesting social experiment. I don’t see it having any real lasting effect, but it was fun to make contact with random people.”