Online Chat, as Inspired by Real Chat

Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social. Meebo, founded by Elaine Wherry, Sandy Jen and Seth Sternberg, offers chat rooms to be embedded in Web pages. People visit each other’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator. Now a new wave of Silicon Valley companies is bringing live socializing back into a medium that has, in the parlance of the technologists, grown overly asynchronous.

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