Back in the early years of the Internet, one of the most popular forms of cyber-interaction was a technology called "chat". E-mail let you correspond with someone, but chat enabled real-time conversation between two or more people - whatever you typed onscreen was seen immediately, as you typed, by all the other people gathered on your chat "channel".
Thus was cyber-sex born (along with many other less-titillating forms of real-time congress). With the advent of the graphics-based World Wide Web, chat's popularity increased - it only took a mouse click to download whatever "client" software was needed to join the thousands of burgeoning chatrooms on the Web. With the most recent Java-enabled Web browsers, users don't even have to download a client, as Java does the trick.
Now chat, always burdened with a slightly seedy reputation as the technology of the virtual pickup scene, is undergoing a major makeover. According to a recent report from New York industry analysts Jupiter Communications, chat is becoming an increasingly common tool in the workplace.
Companies like Quarterdeck, Business Evolution, e-Share and i-chat, which originally designed social chat software for sites like Yahoo! and Time-Warner's Pathfinder, have rolled out products in recent months designed specifically for the corporate world.
And last week chat gained further respectability as Oracle and Lotus announced that they will bundle chat software into their widely-used business software packages Inter-Office (Oracle) and Domino (Lotus).
"I'm surprised that chat hasn't been used in businesses before now," says analyst and Jupiter report author Ms Kate Doyle. "It's clear that people like the medium." Before America Online switched to a flat-fee pay model, chat was credited with driving 70 per cent of the Internet subscription service's revenue.
People still spend over a million hours daily in AOLs 19,000 chatrooms. Overall, Ms Doyle claims about 20 to 25 per cent of the online audience indulge in chat.
Jupiter believes that forms of chat will increasingly be used on Websites to sell products, to build relationships with clients, and for customer service. In addition, chat is taking its place within organisations as another communication medium, along with video-conferencing and e-mail. Another popular use is as a messaging application - chat lets one person send another a message which will pop up onscreen in a small window.
Although simply adding chatrooms can significantly raise traffic to a Website (up to a 50 per cent rise, according to Business Week, with an average site visit of 30 minutes, as opposed to the usual seven) businesses may remain wary of a technology they have traditionally seen as a productivity scourge - many are familiar with employees sneaking into online chatrooms during the workday.
"It's almost like they need to change the name from `chat' to something else," says senior analyst Ms Jill Frankle of industry analysts International Data Corporation in New York.
Still, chat - which these days uses a split-screen environment to deliver content (documents, a video, a Website, a Power Point presentation) on one half, and conversation on the other - is making inroads into some surprising places, from hefty corporates like Texas Instruments, Du Pont, Lucent, and Xerox, to large US government agencies like NASA and even the Pentagon.
Chat's most visible business manifestation is its use for online product launches. Elizabeth Taylor used it last week to flog her Passion perfume online, while IBM used chat's multimedia capabilities last month to re-launch its AS400 computers with a "pushed" presentation and follow-up chat session for thousands.
More esoteric uses include connecting scientists tracking earth-orbiting satellites at Nasa, and supervising the transport of nuclear waste at the US Department of Energy.
After reviewing one of the pricier chat products for three months, Du Pont went ahead and bought it. "There are many ways that we can utilise this product within Du Pont - to reduce the need for face-to-face meetings, and as a supplement to improve the effectiveness of audio conferences," says Mr Robert Ford, Du Pont's global information technology leader.
Chat is also winning converts as a tool for online customer service, because from a customer service perspective, talk is cheap. One representative can deal with multiple customers at once and phone costs drop. US Internet service provider SpryNet already handles 2,000 customer enquiries a month through chat, while stockbrokers Pristine Capital Management are using it for online consultations with clients.
Nonetheless, it's been a slow climb for chat merchants to reach business customers. "We chose to go after the social market first to create brand equity," states i-chat's vice-president of marketing, Mr Dean Kruse. "The corporate space two and a half years ago, when we came into it, wasn't ready for this."
But British businesses remain sceptical about chat. I-chat's UK managing director, Mr Barry Cochrane, says that although Capital Radio, Scotland Online and the BBC Website www.beeb.com all use i-chat software for their social chat sites, he gets blank looks when he tries to sell the British corporate world on business chat. That will change, says Mr Ian Dunlop, development director for new products at Lotus Ireland. With chat software automatically included with a product used by everything from small companies to the largest enterprises, businesses will start to give it a try.
While Lotus's communications package Domino already allows for the interchange of documents, for team collaboration on projects and online communication, Mr Dunlop says chat brings real-time, onscreen interactivity - "an excellent extra feature which is complementary to [Domino]".
He thinks Ireland has a built-in market for business chat with the large base of multinational call centres located here. The Government would be another candidate, but even small companies with an intranet can make use of it.
"I think it will take off," he says. "I just think it will take a little longer to play out in Europe."
