SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2014 • [email protected] • www.thepeninsulaqatar.com • 4455 7741 inside Star power helps COMMUNITY awaken Before • CHANSS-Qatar marks Kerala’s I Go to Sleep birthday P | 5 P | 8-9 WHEELS • 2015 Jeep Compass: Off-road look, without the muddy fenders P | 6 BOOKS • Black music, white culture and a legendary US highway P | 7 HEALTH • Zumba, pilates and their ilk are no longer a no-man’s land AOL’sAOL’Ls InstantInI stant MessengerMeM sssene ger ququietlyieetly P | 11 killedkillled offoff itsits chatroomschhatrt ooms inin 2010.20100 Yahoo Messenger axed its public chatrooms in 2012. And when MSN TECHNOLOGY Messenger closed shop on Friday in China, the last place where the • Apple criticised after service still operated, it marked the users’ private files conclusive end of the mainstream end up in the cloud chatroom era. P | 12 END OF LEARN ARABIC • Learn commonly used Arabic words CHATROOMS? and their meanings P | 13 2 PLUS | SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2014 COVER STORY By Caitlin Dewey Just look at the earliest, successful forerun- realm of PLATO, people began to form highly per- ner to online chat — a program that academics sonal, social connections that had nothing to do acebook chose an odd time to launch invented, almost by accident, long before the birth with academics. In other words, they just wanted Rooms, its homage to the classic ‘90s of the World Wide Web. to chat. chatroom. AOL’s Instant Messenger, per- Talkomatic, the program’s appropriately retro “People met and got acquainted in Talkomatic, Fhaps the icon of the anonymous instant- name, was born out of PLATO, a computer-based and carried on romances via “term-talk” and messaging age, quietly killed off its chat rooms in education program at the University of Illinois, in Personal Notes,” one of its creators, David Woolley, 2010. Yahoo Messenger axed its public chat rooms 1973. It was primitive, by modern standards: Only wrote in his 1994 history of the program. “Many in 2012, explaining only that they weren’t a “core five people could chat at once, and their messages online personalities developed ... Many people trav- Yahoo! product.” And when MSN Messenger shuts displayed letter-by-letter as they typed. But at elled to Urbana to see the lab and meet those of us down Friday in China, the last place where the the time, Talkomatic was something of a revela- who worked there ... Over the years, PLATO has service still operated, it will mark the conclusive tion. PLATO had been designed for classroom use; affected many lives in profound ways.” end of the mainstream chatroom era. according to its creators’ original plans, “com- Of course, PLATO could only reach so many Sure, we have Rooms now — but Rooms, despite munication between people would play (only) an people. But in 1980, CompuServe — one of the its branding and anonymous discussion groups, has incidental role.” But as more people signed on to earliest commercial Internet services — would little in common with the chatrooms of yore. And the community, its participants began to notice release its own take on the chat concept, allowing like other modern attempts to reincarnate the something striking: In the freewheeling, pseu- more than 123,000 to sign on nightly under screen- ‘90s chat room (Airtime,(,y) anyone?) it seems to lack donymousy names like “Mike” and “Silver.” (Both(, names are, thatthat critical quality thatthat made early AIM, YahooYahoo incidentally,incidentally, critical to chatchat room history:history: MessengerMessenger and MSNMSN fun: the edge of qquirki-uirki- TheyThey were, on Valentine’s DayDay 1983,1983, ness,ness, transgression andand inventiveness.inventiveness. oneone ofof the firstfirst couples to marry The feelingfeeling that this was a new and aass a result of online chat.)chat.) semi-lawlesssemi-lawless space,space, tthathat unex-unex- pectedpected thingsthings could happen.happen. The rise, fall and reincarnation of the ’90s chatroom PLUS | SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2014 3 Even though CompuServe’s “CB chat product, the company boasted You need look no further than to our offline identities, Facebook basi- Simulator” was a commercial service, an estimated 19,000 chatrooms. Apple’s app store for conclusive proof cally obliterated the infinite possibili- it shared something of the pioneering Users spent more than a million of that: Besides Rooms, there’s the ties, and the intimate, interest-based quirkiness of ye Talkomatic chats of hours chatting each day. And despite anonymous local chat app Yik Yak, communities, of the social Web. old. The CB stands for citizens band the panicked testimony of then-sen- the embattled, Vermont-born Omegle It’s no wonder that, 10 years in, radio — a relative of ham — and origi- ator Herb Kohl just two years prior (which still ranks we’ve begun to wax nostalgic over that nally operated in similar ways, bor- (“Most Americans don’t know what it among the world’s lost infinity. rowing from radio’s lingo and channel is out there on the Internet,” he told top-3,000 sites), “We’re tired of being told what to do, system. In one early “channel,” a Senate committee, “and if they did and the unher- what to see, and how to interact online described by InfoWorld in 1984, users they would be shocked”), the influx of alded start-up by platforms that resemble rat mazes did nothing but speak Old English and new users was helping chatrooms shed Banter, which per- more than sandboxes,” Kyle Chayka roleplay as kings and maidens. In oth- their previously shady, transgressive haps captures the wrote in Gizmodo. “... Like artisanal ers, a form of radical, soul-baring hon- image. hipster nostalgia for a time when men esty was fairly common; between the “Chat, always burdened with a were men, shoes were handmade, and fake names, the small communities, slightly seedy reputation ... is under- everyone pickled their own vegetables, and the hours of online contact, the going a major makeover,” enthused one Chatrooms were the internet’s vanguard is pushing for idea of intimacy became “very seduc- 1997 trend piece in the Irish Times. experiencing a cultural a return toward a simpler digital era.” tive,” one user told InfoWorld. Chatrooms were showing up in busi- shift similar to one And so a team of unabashed ide- “To say this typewritten “human ness software packages, such as Lotus alists launched a minimalist, ad-free contact” or “people typing in their and Oracle. The rooms had become a much-discussed on social network called Ello, a promise thoughts” is the equivalent of genuine favored hangout not only of teenag- Facebook today: to return to a pre-Facebook web. The friendship or intimacy is something ers and technophiles, but of stay-at- a space that was writer and programmer Paul Ford — else,” wrote Vic Sussman, struggling to home moms. (“Beats doing housework, who has long been a compelling voice understand the very concept of online don’t you think?” one frequent chat-er once a frontier, was on the culture and legacy of tech — community for The Washington Post joked in 1996.) And companies that being standardised, made a super-retro Unix network in 1986. “It’s certainly the illusion of had previously eschewed their own monetised — intimacy — the instant gratification of stand-alone chat services, such as human contact without responsibility Yahoo and MSN, were beginning to colonised by moms. or consequences or actual involvement offer their own. ... (But) the danger is that going online In some ways, in fact, chatrooms instead of going into the real world were experiencing a cultural shift ultimately turns conversation into a similar to one much-discussed on spectator sport.” Facebook today: a space that was For users, of course, this kind of once a frontier, was being standard- outsider bemusement was half the ised, monetised — colonised by moms. motivation. The Web didn’t achieve And the places that remained on the anything like mainstream usage until fringes were categorically gross: full of well into the ‘90s; before then, the spam and sludge and a/s/l-style solici- people sitting through many, many tation, a far cry from the supportive minutes of dial-up bleeps and buzzes, communities of the late ‘80s. all to talk to pseudonymous strangers, Combine that with the advent were a very particular breed: hob- of new Internet technologies like byists and early adopters and other DSL (which made AOL’s subscrip- technophilic types, each drawn to this tion model obsolete) and new para- peculiar experiment in part because it digms for online social networking was peculiar, and its results were far (think Friendster, Myspace and later, from known. Facebook) and the chatroom’s demise You never knew quite what, or who, was obvious, if not imminent, by the you would find in a Compuserve chat early aughts. — or, later, a chat on AOL (c. 1992), I remember signing into my AIM Prodigy (1992) or Yahoo (1997). AOL’s account as late as 2007, the better to chief architect and longest-serving chat with high school friends who had, employee, Joe Schober, once described like me, gone away for school. But by the earliest AOL chatrooms as “little that point, all of AIM’s best features spirit of early chatrooms best of the called Tilde.Club a few weeks ago; he frontier towns”: small and unpolished, had become redundant: status mes- three. (“Who you are in real life is not was startled to see hundreds of people perhaps, but pioneering — like a spark sages could go on Twitter, detailed important,” Banter’s founder told The clamouring for invites to the thing. in the big Internet void.