Hawaii Chat Universe:
    I don't quite remember exactly when or how I happened to stumble upon this chat room, but I found it quite interesting because they are a lot of local people to be found in the several chat rooms at Hawaii Chat Universe, or HCU. Before actually entering the chat room, you must type in a "handle," which is a nickname, a password, and an optional URL, or home page, address. Once this is done you click on the login button and are presented first with an update bulletin of the site, from where you can enter a list of about 9 different rooms. These rooms are as follows: Love Life Radio Chat Room, Rainbow Room, Wave Room, Hawaiian Honey-Waikiki Kitty, Plumeria, Surfer's Paradise, No Whispers, Chatter of The Week Room, and the Rendezvous. I believe the chatter of the week room is a room dedicated primarily to a selected "chatter" who wins the privilege of having his or her own room by being voted the busiest chatter of the week. Pretty self explanatory I suppose, but I don't understand why someone would want to spend all their time chatting on a computer just to have such an honor, if that is what you wish to call it!  The Rendezvous is a special room in which only two people can enter at a time.....so, one can only imagine what they would be doing in there. If you're Really curious, or don't have a clue you may want to go to HCU and find out for yourself. Besides what fun is it if I tell you? The other rooms allow a certain amount of users usually between 16 and 22.

    Now you ask, "how does one chat in these rooms?" Well, to start, after you reach that screen with the list of all rooms I mentioned earlier, you pick a room that looks interesting to you, and then you click on the link to that room. Once you are there you will notice two different boxes in which you can type out your messages. One box is to place public messages for all to see, and the other is to type private messages to certain others of your choice. To write a public message is rather simple: just type in the top box and click on the send button. Writing a private message is also quite easy: just type in the lower box, check the name of the person you want to send it to, click on send and Voila! It's really quite simple, just takes a while to get used to the system. This brings me to the reason I chose this room. Though I haven't been to every chat room out there, I noticed that this room has a different system than most. For example, the most obvious difference is that it doesn't have an auto scroll feature. What does this mean? Well, many chat rooms have a feature that automatically updates, or refreshes, the screen for you every time you or someone else types something in. This is quite convenient because you don't always have to manually refresh the screen for new messages. One of the annoying things about this room that doesn't have the auto scroll feature is that the actually chatting process takes a lot longer. Of coarse, the upside is that if you type as slow as I do, it's actually quite a blessing!!! Last but not least, if you don't like the room you are chatting in, you can always switch to another room by clicking on the "Who's Everywhere" link on the menu bar which is located at the top of the page. This menu bar also has other features including a brief tutorial on how to chat and a FAQ page. However, from my experience, nothing is better than actually experiencing it yourself, though the tutorial is useful when you first start. Overall, this is a good place to start for those of you who want experience chat rooms for the first time, because it is rather user friendly, and so are the people in the rooms.

Alamak:
    This I believe was the first chat room I ever visited. It's been few years since I last went to this chat room, so I decided to go visit it again, and look for any changes. Wow, was I surprised!!! They have made a lot of changes including greatly simplifying the home page by placing a nice menu bar on the top portion of the page which allows you to chose from several options including sending them mail, finding about their services, playing a game called Cybermist, and of coarse, entering the chat forums. Since this report is about chat rooms, I will only cover this topic. Upon clicking on the "chat" link I was immediately thrown onto a page which gave many chat room entry options, including free entry, operator entry, chat policies, a user picture directory and  quite a few other options. Everything on this page was entirely new to me and got me a bit confused. I decided not to delve into exploring unnecessary areas and just looked into a the few categories I just mentioned. I learned that an operator is someone who is a paying member of the Alamak chat and game services. I believe they have quite a few privileges including the ability to use different colors, create their own private chat rooms, boot or ban others from chat rooms and a nice list of other  features. Personally, I think you have to be pretty damn bored to want to pay for these special features, but I suppose some people really enjoy chatting away all day and night. I also took a peek at the chat rules and policies to familiarize my self with the chat etiquette standards. They were pretty basic and well defined, stating what would come to most as just plain common sense. I couldn't help but take glance at the at the picture gallery. It was quite interesting, was a nice range of pictures including pets, cartoons and of coarse, humans. I thought this was an interesting concept because then you can actually match up faces to the names that you are chatting with. At first I thought that this could be dangerous because a psychotic stalker could take a liking to one of the chatters, and who know where they would go from there. However, the chances of this happening are just as likely even if there weren't any pictures posted. Besides, many of the chatters use different handles than the names they have given to the pictures, so it can be quite hard to match up them up. Interesting concept.

    Last but not least, I entered the free Alamak chat (what, did you think I was going to pay?) to see if anything was different since the last time I had visited. I popped up in a room with nine different servers; each server had a list of several rooms. I chose one, entered my handle and was immediately whisked away to a chat room. One thing I quickly found was that it is a good idea to go to the help link and find out the special commands if you plan on chatting there long. Since I didn't want to kill too much time I looked over some commands, but only remembered how to check who was in the room and how to send private messages. There are far too many special commands for a person to remember in one chat session. However, you can get away with just knowing a few basic ones. The chat room offers a small scroll down menu from which you can switch to different rooms or even other servers. I tried this out and noticed a different attitude  and atmosphere in almost every room. Many of the rooms in different servers were the same , but I noticed that they didn't all function the same. For example, some of the servers had an auto scroll feature that refreshed the screen automatically every 15 seconds, whereas others required you to manually refresh the screen by clicking the "post" button or hitting the return/enter key. Unfortunately, there were way too many rooms for me to go through, but if you're bored you are more than welcome to find out what they are all about. Compared to HCU, the Alamak system is far more sophisticated and complicated. I would not recommend going to this site for a person new to chatting. He or she could get lost in the entire clutter of special commands and string of servers. I myself was pretty lost even though I had been on this chat site many times before. I got a bit frustrated because I was getting lost in the array of servers and rooms. Definitely not for beginners!

Sneaker Chat:
    I decided I would try searching for a chat room this time around. So, I went to the Excite search engine and typed in "java chat rooms." This brought me to a list of results from which I picked Sneaker chat after looking through several other chat sites. This site looked the most appealing to me because it had a simple layout and the page itself was pleasant to look at. The reason why I chose to search for java based chat rooms is because their platforms support a system of "real time" chat. What this means is that you get the auto scroll feature that I mentioned before as well as chat messages posted as soon as the person hits the enter button. You don't have to wait for the new page with new messages to load. Of coarse, the timing may not be exactly accurate given the amount of time it takes for your computer to receive and process the information from your isp and their isp (internet service provider) .  In any case, the concept is that the chat is supposed to as close to "real time" as possible.

    Upon entering the Sneaker Chat home page, I saw the same basic list of links, ones that described the rules and policies, chat instructions,  FAQ's, and of coarse the link to the chat rooms itself. There were a few other links, but I only found it necessary to list the ones that most useful for this report. After, I clicked on the chat room link, I came upon a page that had five main chat rooms: chat central, sports chat, the courtyard, teen chat, and skibo pub. I clicked on a link to one of the rooms and was presented with a frame in which asks for your name, handle, email address, image URL, and home page URL. I believe the image URL is suppose to link to where there is a picture of you, the rest is self explanatory. After filling in all the fields I clicked on the "connect" button, and entered the chat room. It was very simple to use this room! Just type your message in the box and hit enter. If you want to send a private message, type the message, select who who want to send it to by highlighting their name, and finally, hit the "whisper" button. If you want to change rooms, you can click the "rooms" button to find a separate window listing an endless amount of rooms including the five main ones. These rooms varies in topics ranging from religion to comics to the Spice Girls (yuck!). There were again way too many to list, but I believe many rooms are added and deleted from day to day. In this window you can  also create your own chat room if you are a registered user. The chat frame also gives you several other features, such as an options button which allows you to change background colors and font style, color and size. It also features an enframe button which allows the chat frame to be seen as a separate window, and a disconnect button for easy exit. Overall, I found this room to be quite easy to use, and with the vast amount of chat rooms to choose from, I liked it better than both Alamak and HCU. However, if you type slow, maybe it's not such a great idea to log on to this chat site, since you'll have a hard time keeping up with others. It's really not too bad if there are just a few people in the room, but if the room is crowded, the clutter of messages will confuse and discourage the slower typists. Perhaps this room should be reserved for those with a little experience exploring chat rooms, a step up from the HCU chat site.

Netscape/AOL Instant Messenger:
    This service is something I thought I should mention for the simple fact that it's not really a chat room, but rather a mixture between email and a chat room.  It allows you send messages instantly to your friends that also have this service. It is provided free of charge and is quite simple to set up and use. You just request a user name and when AOL service approves it, you can start to use it immediately. Here's how it works: you go to the add users button, click on it, and add the handle of one of your friends that has the service. You can also modify your instant messenger service, IM, to allow background colors and fonts of your choice, block out certain users and a few other features. When your friend logs on to IM, you will automatically be notified by a distinct sound of your choice (or the default). When he or she sends you a message, another distinct sound will alert you of their incoming message, and you can choose to respond to it or ignore it, the latter option being a bit rude of coarse.  It allows live conversations, basically, between you and your friends.
    Ok, now you ask why in the world would you want to chat on the computer with your friend down the street when you can just call them? Well, for starters I have almost never used it to chat with anyone on this same island. It's nice to use if you have friends that live on the mainland or in other countries. Believe me, it really saves on the phone bill! That is the main use I see for it. Of coarse, there is no substitute for hearing your friends' voices or seeing them, but when money doesn't grow on the tree outside your house, it is a much more economic choice! Granted that your friends have a computer at home with internet access, this is really they way to go for cheap communication, especially since email is almost as slow as snail mail for me! The IM service is based on another service called ICQ, which is almost the same as IM, but has way more features. I prefer to use IM because of it's simplicity, and I would really recommend it to someone new to these types of services.
 

ICQ:
    ICQ stands for "I seek you" and is similar to IM in that it allows live conversations with your friends that have your ICQ#. Exchanging handle/nicknames won't work in this service because there may be many others with your same name. The difference lies in the fact that ICQ is quite a bit more complicated than IM. I guess if you have the patience to look at all the features it has on the ICQ web guide and learn how to use them all, it can be quite a powerful internet communication tool. I am quite new to using ICQ so I don't know of all the features they offer yet, and I am a bit lost actually. There are just too many features for someone to absorb in just a day. The ICQ link here gives a good Q&A session, explaining the basics of the service, a guided tour, and ICQ features. From what I learned, ICQ provides chat rooms including those that are related to your specific interests, or you can try an random chat in which the system connects you to a chat partner of it's own choice. You can look for email addresses, phone numbers, companies and people, as well as search by interests, profession, affiliation, and more. It also provides email integration, access to new groups and data conferencing, internet games, file transfers and numerous other internet activities. It is really quiet amazing what you can do with this service!!! I'm still lost trying to figure them all out! At this point even the basic messaging is a bit confusing to me!
    I would highly recommend this site to those serious about internet based communications, but it takes a lot of time and patience to learn all the features. ICQ can be a very useful tool in business conferencing for those who don't have access to video conferencing, and don't want to use the phone.  If you want just a simple form of messaging, go with IM, but if you have the desire to explore the ICQ world of communication, it may just be time well spent. Personally, I think I'll integrate myself into the system very slowly. For now I think I'll stay with IM.
 

Final Thoughts:
    The most valuable thing I learned from visiting all these chat rooms is that one must exhibit self control!! I found myself chatting with people for long periods of time while I was doing my research on these different sites. If my friends hadn't called me up I probably would have forgotten to eat! It is always interesting to talk to people from different parts of the world with both different and similar interests, but a person can get lost in conversation! I remember the first time I ever got into a chat room a few years ago, eight or nine hours had passed by the time I finished chatting! I met a lot of interesting people that day, a few with whom I still keep contact, but I slowly learned that it was key not to get carried away on those rooms. I think this is a good area for research for those in future generations: why people get addicted to chat rooms, or what drives them to stay in them for hours on end. I found the differences between the rooms I explored to be quite significant. There are rooms for those more familiar to chat, and those new to it. I hope my analysis is somewhat useful to anyone interested in trying them out. Just remember to watch your time, otherwise you may just see it flying by!! I find the IM and ICQ services to be quite useful, the latter being more so because of it's vast amount of features. I highly recommend either of these two services to those who are online frequently and wish to efficiently communicate with their long distance friends.
 

Suggestions for Future Generations:
    There is a lot of room for research on this topic. There are many other types of rooms which I'm sure I haven't mentioned or even know about. These are target areas for future exploration. There is also the area of psychological analysis of those who enter these chat rooms. For example, what drives them to their addictions to these rooms? The topics are numerous, but I'll leave it up to the new guys to figure them out! Have fun and don't get addicted!!!