Some of my favorite early Internet memories came from visiting chat rooms: I started out using Microsoft Comic Chat and graduated to AOL chat rooms early on. When the Internet was young (and there wasn’t as much to do), it was pretty easy to become entranced by the number of random topics in which one could instantly discuss in real time. It was all honest fun, but I won’t lie, there was definitely that underlying sense of “OMG, I can totally lie about who I am, and no one will be the wiser.” This, of course, being a choice that many Internet users make to this day.

Having grown out of AOL, I moved on to vanilla IRC, where everything changed. Finally, an actual sense of community (and that desire to please the channel ops for some mod privileges). Yet somewhere along the line, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger came along and usurped IRC by simply establishing presence: if you wanted to talk to someone, you just sent them an IM -- no more waiting around in the chat room to see if they’d pop in.

But the chat culture that we once knew and loved hasn’t disappeared completely, although its shape has changed significantly. IRC is still widely used, but these days it tends to be a tool too raw for use outside the geek set, where it’s frequently employed in conference “back-channels” or listener discussions for podcasts such as This Week in Tech. IM has become a de-facto mode of communication amongst friends and co-workers, so ubiquitous Google has begun to merge it with email (first with Gchat, and now with Google Wave). But for that random and serendipitous sense of discovery, where can the chat-hungry turn?