Last night, Ben Folds honored his acolyte Merton, of “Chatroulette Improv” fame, by improvising different piano songs for every person he came across on Chatroulette. Only Folds wasn’t performing from the comfort of his bedroom: he was performing live in front of 2,000 people in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Video and mini-recap after the jump:

Are you tired of the endless iterations upon iterations of Chatroulette-related humor? Maybe so, but if you are a fan of musical comedy, laughter, and hooded sweatshirts, you may enjoy Chatroulette Piano Improv, wherein a hoodied fellow called Merton (who disavows all comparisons to Ben Folds) improvises piano songs for all of the people he meets on Chatroulette.

Sample lyric: “Man in the dark with his headphones on doesn’t want no one to see him / Sittin’ out late at night on Chatroulette.” Chatroulette response: NO HEADPHONES / LIAR / LIAAAR.

Video after the jump:

When everyone suddenly started noticing Chatroulette a month or so ago, a lot of the early, excitable commentary centered around how the anonymous, ADD blitz of introductions brought us back to the Wild West days of the ’90s Internet, when chatrooms reigned supreme, strangers could really be strangers and no one knew you were a dog. Also: guys’ wangs.

So much for all of that: Chatroulette Map, a new web-based project, pulls IP addresses and images from Chatroulette to map user locations with alarming specificity. Especially if you’re in a big city, you can actually chart logins and pictures with an alarming level of detail.

This past Friday, German paper Der Spiegel ran the first-ever in-depth profile of Andrey Ternovskiy, the creator of Chatroulette. It’s a fascinating read — and all of today’s Chatroulette trend piece writers should make a note of Ternovskiy’s stated long-term goal of “keeping the ‘freaks and f***ers,’ as he calls them, off the site.”

The piece focuses on the battle between Russia and the U.S.A. over smart, talented tech entrepreneurs, and makes the point that if Russia loses the Ternovskiys of the world (and, by extension, the Chatroulettes of the world), it’s already lost the next round of the tech war.

All of which is well, good, and abstract, but the writer saves his biggest bombshell for the end of the narrative profile: Andrey Ternovskiy is applying for a visa to come the U.S.A.

What do Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Keith Olbermann have in common with a masturbating Jason Jones? They all appeared on tonight’s hilarious Chatroulette segment on the Daily Show.

Scoring an impressive Big Three hat trick, Jon Stewart took his viewers through a Chatroulette sessio — plus Olbermann, Liz Claman, some incognito Daily Show staffers and plenty of pixellated male nudity.

Sketch comedy group DrCoolSex has answered, in mockumentary form, the question that we wonder about most these days: what, exactly goes on in Chatroulette’s offices? NSFW.

For your Monday morning amusement, the guys at Penny-Arcade have made a breakthrough in the fast-paced field of Chatroulette weirdness, and they call it The Game.

Using a program that posts their desktop, rather than a webcamera’s output, into the Chatroulette video feed, a person might transmit this simple message with a scrawl of the cursor:

I WILL DRAW YOU

Check out the comic now, cause we talk about the punch after the jump.

Yes, I watched Pretty in Pink last night. I’ll pretend it was because my wife hadn’t seen it, but it’s actually because I still dream of working in a record store with a Smiths poster on the wall.

With Chatroulette tearing up the Net, I was struck by this scene which, frankly, I’d forgotten: (Please forgive the awful camerawork; I’m not the responsible party.)

Over at the New York Times online, the Bits blog has scored a statement from this week’s biggest internet celeb: the creator of random video chat phenomenon Chatroulette. According to the report, the man behind the magic is Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high school student from Moscow.

The bizarre and purposefully invasive service pairs strangers for a two-way chat through web cams, allowing either user to move on to a new partner with the quick click of a button. The result is a lot of sad dorm rooms, shirtless men in bed and the occasional naked exhibitionist. The subject of rabid media attention over the last ten days, Chatroulette has between 10,000 and 50,000 users live at any moment throughout the day and is the momentary hottest in a wave of online social experimentation from Omegle to Google Buzz.

Chatroulette‘s rise through the various layers of Internet culture has been illustrative — illustrative, that is, of how online phenomena bubble up first in the strangest and most arcane of places before finally dribbling down to the “mainstream” outlets that make up the sprawling majority of media. From the horrific cultural smelters of 4chan and SomethingAwful, out through the sprawling network of topical forums, and finally, onto sites like BlackBook, Buzzfeed, and NYMag, the site — which, in case you’ve been speedrunning Dragon Age or something, randomly connects users through their webcams — has evolved to the verge of Internet behemoth-dom.

Ah, Chatroulette — now that you’re about to go mainstream, let us savor the last lingering moments of your cultural relevance, before your meme-riddled concupiscence goes the way of all flesh. And what better way to do that than with a gallery of The Best of the Worst of Chatroulette!