Chat room
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A chat room, or chatroom, is a term used primarily by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology ranging from real-time online chat over instant messaging and online forums to fully immersive graphical social environments.
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[edit] Text-based chat
Online chat is a way of communicating by sending text messages to people in the same chat-room in real-time. Some chat rooms such as Yahoo! use both text and voice simultaneously. The oldest form of true chat rooms are the text-based variety. Talkomatic, developed on the PLATO System around 1974, has a strong claim to have been the prototype of the text-only chat room. The most popular of this kind is Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The popularity of these kinds of chat rooms has waned over the years, and IRC's popularity has rapidly given way to instant messaging. Also a notable number of peopl