How does Omegle work?

Question

Sorry for the vague question, but Omegle has exactly what I want for my site. It's the bare chat system. You send and receive messages instantly. I've spent today looking for a shoutbox method, but all I could find were people saying to use MySQL and javascript intervals to keep checking. Omegle updates instantly with new messages though. How does it all work?

Answer 1

You should read this wikipedia article, it will give you a better insight of the process.

The main keywords here are long-polling, websockets, flash sockets.

Also, this is (one of the places) where node.js+socket.io shine.