What Happened to Chat Rooms?
March 21st, 2009 by Michael Kwan
The Internet is a place that is constantly evolving and changing with the times. It doesn’t feel like it was all that long ago that I was dialing up with my 33.6k modem and chatting with my friends over ICQ, but that was eons ago in the context of the online world. In contemplating how far the Internet has changed in the last 10 or 15 years, I realized one very important aspect of the Internet that seems to have virtually disappeared: chat rooms.
I find this shift in preferences to be a little strange, because we still spend a fair bit of time surfing around on forums and discussion boards. Why don’t we stick around in the chat rooms anymore? The only place where I ever hear about chat rooms these days is when middle-aged news reporters investigate Internet predators and pedophiles. Are those the only people who still “hang out” in chat rooms? That would be a very sad and sobering revelation.
Even though it can be a scary place at times, Facebook has almost become a replacement for the chat room. Friends can connect, share their thoughts, join groups, form ongoing discussions, and so on. I may have (inaccurately) predicted the death of Facebook, since I thought more people would be learning how to use Twitter, but Facebook is still gaining in popularity for whatever reason.
Blogging and social networking are being touted as Web 2.0 concepts, because they encourage the input of the Average Joe, but didn’t we achieve a similar kind of interaction more than ten years ago with chat rooms? Perhaps we are no longer content with anonymous conversation; we want to know, become friends, and follow the people with whom we engage in conversation?
What do you think? Are chat rooms dead? If so, what was the nail in the coffin?
Filed under Technology.
Chat rooms rely too much on people being online at the same time.
I ran a BBS that had forums and chat rooms. The forums were always the most popular. Larger systems than mine didn’t even have chat rooms. Sometimes, forums were so busy they served as sort of a chat room.
I never saw chat rooms that were well-designed. Granted, I haven’t seen that many either, as they were something I rarely used. You miss something, and, for all intents and purposes, it’s gone. That’s not so much the case with a forum. You can focus on a particular message, and reply to it. You can then follow-up on subsequent messages. If the message threading is well-designed, you can follow a discussion and not run into situations where you don’t really know what someone is replying to.
It’s harder to do that in a chat room.
Maybe chat rooms aren’t popular because there isn’t really a real world equivalent. In the real world, if you have a small group of people talking, they take turns. A forum is closer to that. With a chat room, multiple people can be typing at the same time. What’s the real world equivalent of that? A roomful of people talking to each other at the same time, with people shouting louder and louder to be heard over the rest? Who wants that?
Oops. I went in two different directions in that comment!
My first point was that chat rooms rely on people being online at the same time. There is no bigger turnoff than an empty chat room. If you encounter that too often, you’ll stop going. With something like a forum, that’s much less of an issue.
My second point was, when a chat room does get full of people, it can be a real mess. I think I adequately explained that in my first comment.
So, whether it’s an empty chat room or a full chat room, it’s largely an unsustainable system. There’s no point in chatting with yourself! And few people enjoy situations where you have to compete to be heard, all the while losing track of other messages flying by and so on. And, if you get down to just a couple people in a room, why not use eMail or Twitter or any number of other things? A chat room becomes unnecessary at that point, and can be replaced by any kind of real time messaging system.
twitter seems to be what chat rooms used to be – but a little better
I haven’t heard the term chatrooms in ages! Didn’t MSN and ICQ kill chatrooms? The question you should be asking is how ICQ died!
One Word…. Twitter
Twitter doesn’t even come close to a chat room in my opinion. I was a moderator back in the heyday of AOL, and ran a chat on a local BBS.
Twitter is rate limited, and not as real time as one might think. While you can have a bunch of people together on Twitter, the conversations don’t flow as fast as they do in a chat room.
I believe that Instant Messaging has killed chat rooms. You don’t have to go to the masses of unknown with IM, you get your buddies together on your list, they can come or go as they please, it’s in real time and it’s somewhat safer. You can better filter the people you don’t want in your chat in IM.
IRC is still very much used in the development/OSS world. Not only to talk to fellow users, but to talk about development related topics. Take WordPress for example, #wordpress is for user-to-user support and #wordpress-dev is to talk about the development of WordPress.
What I can’t understand is, what happened to the chat rooms? I used to chat in Yahoo, sometimes it was pretty moronic but sometimes you met interesting people. Now there doesn’t seem to be any chat rooms there any more. But how could millions of people just stop? What happened to it? Where did it all go? Where can I go to find people to chat with in real time?
Where did it all go?
They are still around in other mediums, like what the other commenters have said.
Where can I go to find people to chat with in real time?
IM clients, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter have all taken the place of chat rooms, but only IM clients are truly real time.
My brief look in Facebook and Twitter shows that they ask you to find friends, ie people you already know. But how do you find people you don’t know to chat with, as in the old chat rooms?
Thanks.