Word: chatted
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Take cybersex. Happily, I have no personal anecdotes about it, but what could be more of a perversion of human interaction? A mouse, a chat room and a bunch of pixelated images of naked women is hardly an adequate substitute for the most life-affirming and unifying act two people can engage in. Of course, those who frequent cybersex are probably the same people who 200 years ago would have frequented a brothel. Most of us, I think, don't fall into that category. But nevertheless it is indicative of the larger problem--fiber-optic wires are taking the place...
...YORK: Give Theglobe.com credit -- and about $700 million -- for having perfect timing. Three weeks after canceling its IPO because of market doldrums, the chat-heavy Internet portal took one look into Wall Street's newly refilled capital pool and went public Friday -- and struck it rich. Priced at $9, the stock peaked at $97 before settling in at $63 for a payday of some $691 million in market capitalization -- a record for Internet upstarts...
Conventional chat rooms, for those who don't live on America Online, are nothing more than screens of scrolling text produced by anywhere from two to a couple dozen users typing comments at one another. The rooms in the Palace, by contrast, are lushly decorated spaces peopled by creatures whose whimsical plumage may be even more important than what they have...
Moving from ordinary chat into palacespace is like stepping from grainy Kansas into technicolor Oz. Suddenly you're in a bar, on a beach, in Xena's Warrior Palace. Wandering through these computer-generated spaces are avatars ("avs"), visual markers of a human presence that can be pretty much anything, from a wolfhound to a smiley face, James Dean to your own humble head shot. Click on a spot in the room, and your av reappears there. Type sorry to the guy you landed on, and your contrition appears in a thought balloon above your head...
That's when the fun starts. A software upgrade due this month adds two crucial community-building features, paging and searching, that will let users locate and chat with anyone anywhere in palacespace. The OnLive audio software and Microcosm wait in the wings. And the updated servers set for release early next year will let E.C. finally start corralling those thousands of breakaway palaces--and festooning their screens with...