When Jarko Oikkarinen made a college project that later came to be known as IRC (Internet Relay Chat) he had no idea that some day IRC will become one of the most popular and addictive activities on the Internet.

The Internet is all about getting people together and nothing does that better than chat. Every portal worth its salt has a chat room. Right from Yahoo! to Indiatimes- all have chat rooms. But chatting is a lot more than just having rooms and traffic. In order to actually get people to chat you need to stimulate interest. This is what differentiates a good chat site from an average one.

Our Editor’s Choice had got to be Talkcity (www.talkcity.com). The popularity, profits and Wall Street apart Talkcity is the darling of any hard core chat aficionado. It has something for everyone - right from general interest rooms down to the absolutely esoteric (like a room devoted to discussing mating behavior of penguins! ). Talkcity also encourages users to make and maintain their own rooms and build communities. The good thing about Talkcity is the fact that despite promoting free speech they are able to keep a check on the bad element and almost all rooms have a healthy, mediated (not controlled) chat and whenever there are any problems chan-ops are available all the time to sort it out. There are regular talkcity guests, who range from movie stars to politicians with whom users can chat. Talkcity has a strong local orientation and users are encouraged to form local users groups in their cities. Talkcity gets our vote for being a fine example of an organization promoting free speech but at the same time making sure that no one’s sensibilities are hurt!

MSN chat

Our First runner-up, MSN chat (chat.msn.com) is sleek, svelte and swanky with cool graphics and loads of chat rooms (you can even create your own rooms and communities). Besides the usual chat rooms cities, sports, arts, teens, et al, there are some very informative rooms catering to specific interest areas-like finance, shares, property issues, etc. Here users can chat with experts and get advice for free. But there are a few things that we didn’t like about MSN chat. Firstly, to chat on the MSN network you have to have a @hotmail.com or a @msn.com address (another instance of the evil empire at work?!). Now that can be quite a hindrance as people are unlikely to sign for a mail service just to chat. Plus it makes one suspicious to give out e-mail addresses on the Web. And lastly, you need to download the software in order to chat.

Rediff chat

What makes Rediffchat (chat.rediff.com) deserve a mention here is not swank graphics or celeb guests but the nice and cosy atmosphere in almost all the chat rooms. There are rooms for most of the major Indian cities, and quite a few general interest rooms as well. A thoughtful feature in Rediffchat is the choice that it gives to the users to choose between Java or HTML chat. HTML is so much more convenient for those of us who are saddled with slow and old machines running older browsers which don’t support JAVA chats. However one thing missing from Rediff chat is the lack of mediation.