You Talkin' to Me?

The first chat-room search engine is a great idea, but most conversations still read like gibberish

I like chatting with friends and chatting with co-workers. I like chatting on the phone until 3 a.m. with my sister in California. But I never did acquire a taste for online chat. That's because the conversations I attempted with disembodied strangers in chat rooms operated by America Online, Excite or anyone else were invariably inane. It was worse than being stuck at a cocktail party, talking to someone who was clearly recovering from a lobotomy.

But when I first laid eyes on a new service called Chatscan, which allows you to search more than 1,000 Internet chat rooms in a...

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