As a technology, chat rooms actually pre-date the Internet by approximately 15 years, going back to the days of CompuServe and bulletin board services accessible through dial-up modems. From those humble, text-only beginnings, chat rooms have become a vast worldwide phenomenon, with features now including audio and video capabilities in addition to traditional text-based content.
The largest facilitators of chat rooms tend to be portal sites like Yahoo! Groups alone hosts more than four million groups on every topic imaginable.
Chat rooms also show up on websites dedicated to specific topics, providing an opportunity for visitors to converse about the topic at hand. In many cases, such sites provide forums , which may be viewed as an asynchronous form of chat. In a forum, messages are posted publicly sometimes requiring moderation prior to posting and conversation threads often form around interesting posts.
The traditional chat room model incorporates a text window in which a user may type a message, which is immediately displayed to all other users in the chat room. In a public room with many visitors, the flow of messages across the screen can be incredibly confusing since each message is simply posted in sequential order, and typically no clear conversation thread is visible to a casual observer.
In many systems, private chat rooms are provided so that individuals who meet in the public space can find an isolated venue in which to converse privately without all the textual clutter. A particularly troubling trend in chat rooms is the emergence of anonymous random video chatting between complete strangers. The first service to make a significant splash in this space was Chatroulette, a site that allowed a user to video chat randomly with some other user around the world.
