Chat room

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A chat room is an online forum where people can chat online (talk by broadcasting messages to people on the same forum in real time). Sometimes these venues are moderated either by limiting who is allowed to speak (not common), or by having moderation volunteers patrol the venue watching for disruptive or otherwise undesirable behavior.

Chat systems include Internet Relay Chat (or IRC, where rooms are called "channels"), Jabber, and several proprietary systems on the Microsoft Windows and Java platforms.

Some chat rooms go beyond text messages incorporating 2D and 3D graphics with avatars (these types of systems are also referred to as visual chat or virtual chat). Two examples of 2D chat rooms are The Palace and more recently The Manor. These environments are capable of incorporating elements such as games and educational material most often developed by individual site owners, who in general are simply more advanced users of the systems.

Some chat room sites incorporate audio and video communications. People may chat in audio and watch each other there.

Lesser known is the UNIX based talker and the French Minitel.

Chatrooms are often confused (especially by the popular media) with discussion groups, which are similar but do not take place in real time and are usually run over the World Wide Web.

Recently much chat room and instant messaging technology has begun to merge as the dominance of the big three instant messaging providers (AOL, Yahoo and MSN) have tied chat rooms directly into their instant messaging interfaces. This centralization trend is likely to continue to dominate the chat world as these providers begin to merge their services and cooperate in their IM and chat protocols.

One of the first novels to explore the phenomenon of Internet Chatting is Chatroom Blues by India-based novelist Sunil R. Nair. Chatroom Blues (ISBN 8190166905), an experimental work of fiction was published by PrintReach Publications. The book depicts the dark side of people on the chat sites who use the anonymity of the chat room to express who they really are. The main character, Manav, is a failed writer who gets on a chatsite and meets the flotsam of humanity -- people in cyber existence, fourteen-year-old girls, blind men, bored housewives and cold-blooded murderers. Chatroom Blues is one of the first works of fiction to delve into the minds of people who lead a dual life -- one in the real world and another in an artificial medium.

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