Can we Chat?

Alright, I've been around the chat world for sometime I'd say. Back in the early part of 1994, when I first got online, a friend of mine told me about a program called Worlds Chat. This was such a cool program to use and people all over would login and text back and forth. The cool thing was the use of Avatars (a picture image to represent you) and the ability to move around between the lobby and 6 worlds or pods an hang out to chat in countless areas. The program has changed a lot since then and I'm not sure how much it really is used now, but I remember how cool it was.

Next came chats like PoWoW, LoLChat, the Palace; followed by iRC clients like mIRC & Pirch. Then one of the biggest to take the net by storm would be ICQ. I remember talking with the developers of this cool little program and seeing it grow by leaps and bounds. It was one of the earliest IM clients along with Aim from AOL and the up and up incoming MSN Messenger. Text messages and realtime chatting was cool, different from Worlds and had some added features in swapping files back and forth.

Instant Messages kept growing and others like Yahoo would even join into the mix. Then programs like Imici and Trillian came about to allow all IM's to talk with each other. The IM wars began and AIM and MSN would try and block their services from talking with each other.

Voice over IP is one of the latest and greatest things in chat now. So here comes Skype and cool service to allow people to talk with mics over the internet. It gets better, they can call a landline for a small fee or even have a landline call them for a fee. If the person on the other end uses Skype then they can call each other for free. The quality is really great and you can even conference up to 4 people at the same time.

Next comes Google talk, the developers at Google are just awesome and they've rolled out a nice simple text based chat and VoIP. Most of the others are doing the same and its cool that so many options are available to select from. A lot has changed since the Worlds Chat, but one thing is for sure, people love to be connected and love the tools available at their fingertips or the end of their tongue I'd say.

cnet review - Your next phone: new IM tools with VoIP

Happy chatting.

Rob