If you're using a chat room operated by Yahoo! Messenger or AIM, you can use your existing username and password or you can sign up with an alternate username. To join a chat room, you'll need to pick a nickname or user ID. Search around and try to find one that consistently has a dozen or so people online and actively chatting. There are chats for Alzheimer's caregivers, punk music fans, Austrian mountain bikers and everything in between.

There are college basketball chat rooms, car repair chat rooms, tech support chat rooms and emotional support chat rooms. You can also search the Web for chat rooms that fit your interests or needs.

Over the years, chat rooms have lost ground to IM and social networks, and have suffered from bad press concerning their safety, especially for teens.īut how do you get started using a chat room? And how do you make sure you and your children have a safe, enjoyable chat room experience? Read on to find out more. But by 2005, those numbers had fallen to 18 percent of teens and 17 percent of adults. According to statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 55 percent of online teens and 28 percent of online adults used chat rooms in 2000. In the late 1990s, AOL's chat rooms were some of the most popular in the world. Q-Link changed its name to America Online (AOL), which still uses the People Connection name for its chat and community services. PlayNet eventually licensed its software to a company called Quantum Link, or Q-Link, which launched a chat room service called People Connection. Users could play chess or backgammon against an opponent and talk trash at the same time. In the mid-1980s, a company called PlayNet began tinkering with the combination of real-time chat and online games. Users could exchange real-time messages (loaded with lots of CB slang) on 40 different channels, which later evolved into the concept of rooms. Launched to the public in 1980, the CB simulator capitalized on the explosive (if short-lived) popularity of citizen's band radio culture in American country music and movies. But the CompuServe CB simulator is widely regarded as the first real-time chat room.

Most popular chat room programs 90s