Levit left me with a membership and I downloaded PalTalk at home. That night, I mounted a Web cam on the top of my laptop screen, combed my hair and turned it on.

I surveyed the group listings. A few chat rooms were teaming. Sixty-four members were talking in the “Mainstream Politics” group, 30 were practicing English, another 81 were talking in a day-trading forum. The Middle Eastern groups were all packed but the conversation was mostly in Arabic. In one English-speaking chat room, “2 Faces of Terror—Know Your Enemy,” Christians and Muslims unproductively argued the merits of each faith.

The relationship chat rooms appeared to be the busiest; 200 users were gathered in a “Meet New Friends” room. About half had video connections, so I watched stunners from Brazil and fraternity oafs from Iowa spar with each other on my laptop screen. The moderator was acting as a DJ, playing songs from the “Spider-Man 2” soundtrack as folks chatted. The dialogue was both flirtatious and tedious.

Something still didn’t add up. PalTalk reported that at that very moment, 20,000 users were online and chatting in 3,000 groups. I wasn’t seeing that many members or forums.

I entered a room called “A Friendly 35 and Over: A Nice Place to Be.” Two gentlemen, “Gene141” and “Bluto” were competing for the attentions of “Kathy 3706,” a demure-looking middle-aged woman wearing a yellow tank top. I introduced myself as a reporter checking out the service and asked them where the real action was.

They told me to disable the adult-content filter on the PalTalk software. Silly me.

I returned to the PalTalk menu screen and turned the adult filter off. Dozens of new chat rooms—crowded with members—appeared on the main menu. Groups with names like “Braless and Busty” and “Hubby's Away, Wives Will Play” bustled with users, many of whom had their Webcams activated and strategically angled lapward.

A fuller description of these chat rooms—and the activities that take place therein—would violate NEWSWEEK’s decency standards. Suffice to say that I was shocked, appalled and concerned that my wife would catch me looking at this stuff.

Technology insiders talk about Web 2.0, the flourishing layer of the Internet where users themselves provide the material. Blogs, photo-sharing sites and the home-brewed radio shows called podcasts are the pillars of this wave of grass-roots Internet content that is challenging traditional, professionally produced media. This part of PalTalk is, in a sense, porn podcasting. Webcams, broadband Internet connections and PalTalk’s seamless service have combined to allow users to express all their carnal notions to a live, lascivious audience.

The next day, I raised CEO Jason Katz on his PalTalk Webcam. He was back from Florida, sitting in front of open window blinds in PalTalk’s offices in midtown Manhattan. I asked him if adult content was driving the expansion of his company, as it fueled the early growth of the Internet. He disagreed, claiming that the porn rooms “are a very small percentage of the business” and that only 5 to 8 percent of users frequent them.

Still, he thought the relationship rooms and flirtatious chatter contribute to his service’s basic appeal. PalTalk “is an online bar scene where the whole world can interact,” he said. “It’s amazing if you think about it. You might come from a small one-horse town and suddenly the entire world is on your computer.”

The entire world … in their skivvies, or less.