Who would have thought it. Chat rooms – those undying, much loved bastions of online vitality – are not as hot as they used to be. Chat freaks of yesteryear aren’t logging on as often as they used to; and some public rooms wear a cold, desolate look.
Blame it all on Instant Messengers.
“Chat rooms have become boring,” says 22-year-old Amit Mahajan, who now prefers his Yahoo! or MSN Messenger. Even moderators like Chat Jockey Sharmila Taliculam admit to a change. “A regular would often complain that we would not stick to serious discussions. According to me, chat rooms can be easily taken over unlike IMs where one can talk without being disturbed.”
Another fact: Messengers can cut costs. You don’t have to hang around a chat room forever, waiting for a friend to log on. Simply stick to a predetermined schedule, and life’s simpler. At least that’s what Naresh Sharma, a sailor by profession, believes. Even if he happens to be in the same city, Debesh calls his friends and asks them to get online so they can chat on an IM.
Messengers are also preferred because they help eliminate the obscenity one is confronted with at any chat room, at any given point in time. If someone’s not bombarding you with messages like ‘I love you, talk to me’, there’s always the moron who issues a thousand messages and prevents other chatters from getting a word in.
What a messenger also does is cut down on loading time. Ask anyone who’s spent an agonising ten minutes simply waiting for a java applet to load before chatting can commence. A more practical reason for their popularity is that they eliminate a million other folk listening in on your conversation. After all, you can hardly discuss your love life with your sweetheart when Jatinder, Suresh, Nosferatu, ManMan, HunkHot and ManiaManic are all listening in…
With IMs, you can chat with friends, transfer files simultaneously, ask for mail alerts, generate sound effects, do a voice chat – the list goes on. Why, then, would anyone prefer the chaos of a public room where nothing but banalities can be exchanged anyway? There’s your reason number five: Ease of use, and a hundred other features as added incentives.
Not that everyone’s given up on chat rooms though. Some still log on from time to time to get a dose of their pandemonium. Others use them to chat with friends who do not have IMs on their PCs yet. A majority maintain that chat rooms and IMs work together to create a valuable network online. You can find a buddy at a chat room, and then get to know him or her better using your messenger.
Naveen from Bangalore, however, begs to differ. “I use the ‘Find a friend’ icon on my Rediff Bol and get at least one invitation a week from complete strangers.”
People choose their messengers carefully, like they do pets. For sheer features, ICQ is unbeatable, but restricts your contact list only to the PC it is downloaded on. Yahoo! Messenger has features, too, but doesn’t occupy as much space as the MSN Messenger. Some simply use all popular messengers, with separate contact lists for each.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, the latest thing that could hit chat rooms badly are messenger managers like Jabber, Trillian and Odigo, thought these have yet to catch on in India.
So, will chat rooms die a quiet death? Will the chatting habit die? Will public rooms phase out completely?
Not just yet. Have you logged on to the Rediff Smoke Filled Café lately?
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