I remember the old days of the chat rooms. Back in the day, I used to frequent AOL chat rooms for the casual conversation. Every 20 minutes there would always be the \”a/s/l\” question to which I would always respond \”4^2/middle of nowhere/no sorry I have a headache\”.

Then that matured into an AIM chat rooms with the guys of Danville. Random people would always be invited. We would make fun of each other, shouting in caps and flooding the chat with random remarks. We would try to invite all the buddies we had on our lists, making the room chaotic. There would always be the lurkers. I made one of my first virtual enemies there. She said that she would send the Chinese mafia after me. I am still alive.

Then it matured into more controlled chat rooms. With the same online blogosphere. We talked about the issues of the day. We would trade the tech problems, the updates to our software. We would play online games, me screaming in glee when I won scrabble with the word \”knight\”. All while we procrastinated on homework and studying for midterms.

And from there, it was phone conferences. My Cingular plan somehow allowed for multiway phone conferences (the main reason that I didn\’t change providers for years even though I had very bad phone reception). People liked to be anonymous, not saying who they were. Deep voices. People singing. And sometimes me falling into laughing fits. And fun chaos.

Then a lull.

Yesterday was the first \”random\” chat room I participated in for awhile. It was different. Some aim clients didn\’t support chat rooms well. Mature. Chaos unaccepted. But now I have entered a generation of aim with a purpose.