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.

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.

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.

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?