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My gut is that this is just a trend right now. Eventually people will pull back once it gets old. And trust me, things get old. Remember chat? Everybody was crazy about it. There have been many trends that have gotten old too. Just like in fashion,music,video, trends change.

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I'm not sure what you mean here. Chat isn't "old", its just taken for granted now. What's more likely is that sharing every bit of irrelevant data about your life will go the way of chat, in that it becomes so commonplace that isn't not even thought about anymore.

I think the parent was referring to anonymous chat rooms like MSN. Those don't really exist now, yet they were extremely popular fifteen years ago.

Yes, I was referring to anonymous chat rooms.

And no one's "pulled back" from chat. Now its ubiquitous and how many of us conduct all communication at work and much of personal communication.

Are you talking about chat or instant messaging? Those two are different in my view. We use IMs a lot at work. Probably even more than email. Chats get created every now and again, but realistically, it's much less used than IM.

The only place I see chat as really being useful, is for support on websites and applications. However, again it's mostly one-to-one, so it's basically a temporary IM.

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