Web chat sites are social websites that offer their users web chat interfaces to allow them to meet and communicate in real time. They are types of internet chat rooms distinguished by their simplicity and accessibility to users who do not wish to take the time to install and learn to use specialized chat software. Unlike other user-oriented web sites, such as discussion forums and social networking sites, web chat sites typically do not require registration. This trait allows them to offer users instantaneous access, but also generates an extremely high level of competition between chat sites, as it allows users to switch between them with ease. There are hundreds of chat sites, which actively compete with each other to the point where some of the more popular ones, such as Chat Avenue and the Kewlchat Network, actually censor the names of other chat sites, preventing users from referring each other to competing chats.
History and Technology
editIndividual chat sites rise and fall in popularity pretty quickly, but the history of web chat sites is characterized more broadly by trends in underlying web technologies. The first chat sites featured simple interfaces made from dynamically generated HTML pages. HTML-based web chats had big disadvantages in terms of their latency and interactivity, especially when accessed over the slower connections characteristic of the early web. As a result, in the U.S. HTML chat sites largely fell out of use as alternatives became available, though some of the older HTML chat sites, [1] just as Chathouse still remain active. Whereas in other parts of the world, HTML-based web chat sites, using frames and server-push, are still quite popular.
In 1995, Java applet technology was introduced into popular web browsers. Java's well developed network and graphical capabilities made it an excellent platform for creating chat interfaces. Commonly used Java chat interfaces include DigiChat, Chatspace, Conference Room, and PJIRC, but there is a huge variety of Java chat systems in use on the web, many of them proprietary.
Newer web chat technologies, such as those based on Ajax and Flash, have been slow to be picked up by web chat sites, or at least the most established ones. Established sites with dedicated communities try to maintain consistency in their user interfaces to avoid alienating their users, but newer sites that embrace the technology have begun to become successful. Weird Town, for example, is a web community that provides a popular Flash-based chat.
Comparison with other Chat Services
editWeb chat sites represent only a small part of the world of online chat. Though these sites are social in nature, they do not have the same network effects as social networking sites or even other chat services like instant messengers, which become more useful as they become more popular. Smaller, less busy chats can actually have more appeal to users than crowded, popular ones. Really, the only unique feature web chat sites offer is instant accessibility. And in an internet where there are so many other choices for real-time social interaction: internet relay chat networks, instant messenger services, online games, and virtual worlds, web sites devoted to simple text-based chat remain a small, but singular phenonemon.