.. or, the de-evolution and re-evolution of communication.

Online communications has had a strange and varied history. I remember chatting to multiple users at the same time on diversi-dial services back in the 80’s. These were essentially apple II computers, filled with modem cards so that up to *eight* people could talk to each other in a “chat channel”. Seven people could communicate together if the 8th line was being used for a “link” channel, which would link up another 7 people on another machine in a remote location. Rates were slow, around 110-300 baud, but no one really cared, because we could all talk to each other.

These networks spread for a few years, across the nation and world, depending on who wanted to pick up the phone line costs. Like FidoNet, communications worked on the theory that if you could make enough free local phone calls, you could get around long-distance tarriffs and connect the world (or at least, a country) together.

IRC offered this on the Internet years later, and worked on very similar principals. People connected to local IRC servers, and the servers were linked together together on TCP/IP ports. A single link could link thousands of users on one server to thousands of users on other, while keeping everyone in the same topical channels.

AOL Chat rooms existed at the time, but they were no match for the diversity offered in the multi-network chat world that IRC had to offer. It was the power of massive, multiuser, many-to-many communication that was completely missing from AOL. IRC usage has decreased and fragmented over time. Even now, it’s a bit of a wasteland (mostly laid waste by lots of bot and spam wars!)

As people and the associated technologies matured, people went to IM and SMS.

IM is a communications backwater in comparison to IRC. I consider the years when users moved to IM to be the dark ages of online communication. Many companies fought for control of IM protocols and multiple, incompatible protocols currently exist for chat. Some chat clients attempt to fix this by offering multi-protocol support, but one serious feature is lacking in ALL chat clients: Interactive, always-open, multi-channel, muti-user chat! We somehow went back to one-to-one chat and hadn’t even realize what we’d lost.

It’s possible to start a chat room in AIM, but it’s not the same as IRC. Creating a chat room on IM requires invites, acceptance of those invites, and chat rooms disappear from AIM when the moderator logs out. You can’t walk in, join a chat channel, and know that all of your friends (or maybe some new ones), are always going to be there.

This is why twitter works. If you’re using a client like twitterrifc that moves tweets from the website and SMS network to your desktop, you get a fairly reasonable, real-time stream of what your friends are doing and where they are. Logging into twitter ensures that you’re all in the same place, in the same channel, and you have status reports from your friends. It’s not the multi-user, many to many paradise that IRC once was, but chat has come full-circle, and we’ve reinvented IRC. How odd.

Many concepts from IRC have been re-invented or re-imagined by Twitter. Private messages by /msg username message? Thats’s now a direct message, using “d username message”. What’s unique about Twitter is the follow concept. There’s no “rooms”, just groups of people that you’re presently following. The tagging concept (which is oh so web 2.0) is the closest we get to the channel/room concept, with a great site, www.hashtags.org tracking #tags in people’s posts to group them by topics. Ironically, “#” was the channel name prefix on IRC, as in ‘#boston’, or ‘#cooking’.

Because of the message latency inherent in the Twitter system, we’ve also seen the evolution of the “@” syntax to reply back to people. This has even migrated onto blogs, with people replying to other commenter’s postings using the same syntax, like “@someone your comment is pointless”, mainly when the blogging software doesn’t incorporate a threaded reply model.

Where’s online chat going in the next few years? Or does it even matter now that we all have headsets, Skype, Ventrillo, and TeemSpeex to play with and can chat by voice? Voice is an entirely different modality than text, but text is still important. The rise of SMS should tell you this.