#Chatmixer, or How I Traveled Back in Time to 1991
Tonight I participated in my first organized group live chat on Twitter. (Please don’t ask me where I’ve been all this time — you’ll hurt my feelings.) There are dozens of such chats that occur on a weekly basis around common topics or professions, which I had been peripherally aware of: Sarah Evans‘ #journchat, for instance, or Mack Collier‘s #blogchat. Because I recently started following Dana Lewis (who organized SXSH 2010), I caught wind of #chatmixer, an epic convergence of 18 different weekly chats into one.
The organizers of #chatmixer had provided a convenient Tweetgrid for participants to follow along, which I found to be more than helpful. Participants could see the entire conversation stream in one column, questions from the moderators in another, and messages to themselves in a third.
My first impression, echoed by several others, was that the experience was like drinking from a fire hose. With several hundred people participating, messages whizzed by before you had time to process and respond. This is what I imagine it’s like to be following 114,000 people. But it was a casual conversation, so it didn’t matter too much that the conversation was so fragmented.
My second impression was that these types of organized group conversations around a central topic had the potential to be extremely valuable for conversing with and learning from people you’ve never connected with before. Jon Newman voiced this sentiment strongly, when he proposed that “chats are perhaps the most under-used and highest-value opportunity Twitter delivers.” I had stumbled across a sub-behavior on Twitter that I barely knew existed.
Then, a realization set in. I had seen this all somewhere before. It was a distant memory, as if from 15 years ago…
Wait, it was from 15 years ago. This felt like IRC. Internet Relay Chat was (is) a relatively early form of online chat room, invented in August 1988, and accessible by anyone with a dial-up modem. Though I haven’t used it in years, I remember the days of IRC well.
Pop quiz: What’s the difference between Twitter and IRC?
One is a form of public communication and information sharing, consisting of directed (personal) and non-directed messages; conversation are organized around topics by the use of the pound sign, as in #politics; messages are extremely brief, at times almost cryptic to the uninitiated; the members of this service are on the cutting edge of technology, exploring new frontiers in media and communication; and it has been used to report on international political incidents even when the mainstream media were prevented from reporting on the events as they happened.
And the other is Twitter.
Sound familiar? Yes, IRC is all of those things. Not many people know, as Wikipedia reports, that “IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt throughout a media blackout,” and “was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War.”
Maybe you’re still skeptical? Well, take a close look at these two screenshots. I’ll let you decide which is which. (click the images for full size)
Even if you’ve never seen an IRC client before, you can’t help but notice the similarities. But that second screenshot was taken in Macintosh System 7, which came out in 1991!
The only difference is that now, millions more people have discovered the same value — this time in the form of Twitter. Back then, in my experience, it was mostly just a bunch of hackers screwing around in random channels and not really adding much to society. Now, anyone can connect with the biggest public figures and thought leaders in the world. And loose affiliations of professionals — journalists, artists, developers, and yes, even hackers — can come together to create the leading edge of technology, as they explore new frontiers of media and communication.
UPDATE: I didn’t expect to be the first person to have noticed the similarities of Twitter and IRC, but someone has already taken it to the next level: twIRC is the perfect convergence of the two. Love it. (via Mike Whaling – @30lines)
Comments
One Response to “#Chatmixer, or How I Traveled Back in Time to 1991”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe via RSS
Thanks so much for participating in #chatmixer last night. Glad to hear you enjoyed your experience! Hope you’ll be able to start participating in soe of the regular chats! I agree with Jon: Twitter chats are such a valuable part of the Twitter experience!
Heather
@prTini