CHATS ARE BACK

Tabbed browsing is pretty hot, too.

   ASK any young net artist today "what's hot on the net," and they will tell you "CHATROOMS." Remembered for their infamy and inanity in the days of AOL, chatrooms were a staple of the web until some unspecified date in the mid-2000s. The two places that you could go to share your thoughts in realtime with friends and complete strangers were either AOL Instant Messenger or the wild landscape of IRC, Internet Relay Chat. I personally hold fond memories of discussing videogame programming with teenagers from eastern Idaho at two in the morning, back in 2003. When the web made its big semantic jump from "me-specific" to "you-specific" back around the mid 2000s, we searched for truth in spite of our companions, and the chatroom fell from glory.

With the rise of Chatroulette and dump.fm in November 2009, the Internet was proven to be growing weary of the predictability of Web 2.0 and searching for a more meaningful social existence. Facebook and other social networking sites had demonstrated to the constituents of the web the gestalt nature of humans in conversation, and a need had arisen. The missing ingredient to this return to social existence was speed. People want to share and hear thoughts - in realtime!

But the tired forms and emoticons of old proved to be insufficient.Several services are now quickly growing that prompt not only new forms of discourse (such as the aforementioned sites, scannerjammer, tinychat, and turntable) but also allow for a person's login to grow a history and personality in the forms of logs, "likes," "DJ points," and "favs" - generally, a rewards system. This encourages the user, and prompts them to put more energy into the strength of their interactions. All in all, a community benefits everyone involved.