Chat Room Comeback?

So earlier today, I found an article on the New York Times entitled “Online Chat, as Inspired by Real Chat“.

The article begins with this quote

Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social.

It is true, online social networking is simply not as good as face to face social networking. There will be no replacement for the FtF communication that can only be imitated online to a certain extent.

The author presents the following analogy to online social networking on popular SNSs

People visit each other’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator.

It’s true, most of the communication done on popular SNSs is asynchronous, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. I think there is a reason why chat rooms have not reached a massive popularity amongst internet users since the days of AOL’s prime. For one, most chat rooms can become very overwhelming with several conversations between several groups people at once, in the same chat room. Let me put it this way, have you ever sat in a small room with more than a few groups of people, with several conversations going on at the same time? Not only is it hard to hear the person you’re talking to (as they try to raise their voice over the other conversations in the room), you might become distracted with the current conversation as you listen in on the other conversation. This is the dilemma that online chat rooms face if they adopt the same simple text based model.

There is promise in the use of chat rooms besides being just a chat room embedded on your Facebook/MySpace profile. For example, imagine watching a TV show on Hulu, or a clip on YouTube (both are streams that usually asynchronous/not live), but inviting your friends online to watch the show with you. Instead of everyone watching asynchronously, the show is synchronized to start and playback at the same time as each user is connected to the stream. As the show or clip goes on, the viewing experience becomes shared and comments/links/reactions can be distributed within a chat room that is overlaid or positioned alongside the video stream. This is analogous to sitting in your living room watching TV with your friends, or even watching a live TV show while chatting with your friends via IM.

Another idea I have deals with proximity. What if there was a way to filter conversations depending on your interest or location? This might be hard to understand so I’ll provide a brief example. What about a dynamic chat room that followed your browsing and reading habits online in a specific website (not the entire web, just one particular site)? Let’s take ESPN.com for example. You start off by looking at the front page, and your chat room is currently loaded into the Top Stories arena, but then you navigate to the NCAA Basketball home page and then your chat room dynamically shifts to a different room whose primary focus is with College Basketball. The conversations are moderated to make sure topics continue to be relevant, as well as being linked to your friends who may be browsing the same section on the site. Imagine discovering that your friends are also looking at the NBA Standings, a conversation can be triggered as each person debates why their team isn’t number 1.

So yes, chat rooms can make a comeback… so long as their implementation is more than just a 3-d avatar embedded in a web browser, or a chat box with no dynamic functionality.