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.
When I was a teenager in high school, chat rooms were all the rage, providing a venue where we could connect with people who had similar interests. I could join just about any conversation, talking about the latest video game from Nintendo or even venturing into the world of politics if that’s what I wanted to do. These days, I’m just as addicted to the Internet as I’ve ever been, but I haven’t come within arm’s reach of a chat room for years.
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?
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.
People I met in chat rooms years ago still keep in touch with me. I liked them better than I like what has replaced them. Social media sites use your data for any number of reasons. That’s how they bring in a profit. Chatrooms not so much.
I think chatrooms might have started in an attempt to bring subscribers to Yahoo etc.
Once established, it prob. served no purpose to pthe companies and cost them money. I’m alrigt with today’s social media because it got me in touch with some people that I lost track, but
miss talking in chat rooms.
I miss chat rooms too. I think there is a time and place for them. When you’re bored or would like to be a fly on the wall, or just meet someone new, but with some anonymity, at least until you decide their worth giving your more permanent for of contact to.
Facebook is great, I get to see what all my friends have been up to from middle school to my current co-workers, but that doesn’t come close to the experience of a chat room.
I’ve even tried Omegle.com to get a similar experience, but it’s truly hit or miss, but that is about as close as it gets.
chat rooms and finding new people around the world is what got me through a lot of my youth. I was fairly shy, still am, but in chat rooms I could just come out and say what I felt without the social repercussions that would come if I did that with people I already knew, or especially now in the professional world. I think chat rooms and IM’s really helped me define my self in adolescence and youth.
I was on AOL long ago,for many years and I also miss chat rooms, fast and furious sometimes, but it was great! A perfect example was in the catagory of sport fans. If your team just won a big game or even a championship man you just wanted to get on the chat fast and do some bragging directly to the other guys doing the crying and bashing! Nothing like that now is there?
Twitter, sort of.
Chat rooms never went away, we all went to Paltalk when MSN and Yahoo stopped. The question should be: Where have you gone? 🙂
I liked the internet before the web. When it was alternative and underground. Before AT&T had a clue and there were world chat boards with 70 lines that you could access for phree to get the real political scoop from a human perspectives. When locals would post and take over a coffee shop or pizza place. Now it’s like tour buses called search engines go to certain sites and the rest is gone. The Bohemian hang-outs (real coffee shops)and communication have given way to lucrative divying up of virtual territory. The landscape of the internet before the web (that I enjoyed) was over run to make it popular, formatted, proprietary, and a buck. When AOL came on the scene it was the beginning of the end. The old places, well the search engines don’t go there, and it can’t be controlled, there’s no access and they’re gone. It’s not about real communication; it’s the empty shell, to delegate, for a techcandy fix, and a price.
thank you for saying that and so beautifully too. yes the emergence of aol killed free thinking. i myself preferred things the way they were back when had chat rooms. why because when nobody was in there it made you get up and away from the computer. now everyone has to be tied in to the internet 24/7/365 with at least 3 devices on them with forums and twitting bullying has become more prevalent because people from all walks of life jump in on the harassment. in a chatroom the bullying would be stopped or end simply by getting off and waiting a few hours before it was erased.
In 2013, forums are rapidly dying as well. I can only name a few with very large active usership. I think the direct replacement of IRC chats is video chat rooms and stranger chats. The problem is, there’s no happy medium. In a stranger chat you’re completely anonymous but are talking to a single person. In a video chat you’re only as anonymous as your image allows you to be, but at least there is a group of strangers there. What is missing now that chat room provided was a mini-community where there was no commitment to be made profile-wise, but you had a handle and didn’t have to show your unshowered self to the world. MySpace was like a cross between a forum and a community like Friendster. Facebook and MSN were for people you know and want to talk to again. You can’t just change your hotmail address and essentially become a new person every time you want to like you can with a chat. On chats you were whoever you wanted to be. It was quite freeing back in the days of the late nineties. Twitter is anonymous but much more focused on self-promotion rather than the conversation/community. The real killer of old technology is the human need for the new-new-new. RIP Chats 🙁 As of today, ICQ still offers free rooms, but the usership is rather elitist.
Guys we are opening a new chatrooms website called e-chat, its completely free, please join and see if you like it. Go to
http://www.e-chat.co
Its very simple to use and has functions like make your own room etc.
Hope this helps, thanks!
I think it is some kind conspiracy. People don’t want us talking freely on the net. That’s why my twitter tweets don’t show up in searches. They can’t regulate it.