By Rakhi Mazumdar

It's what the chatterati is chatting about. Literally. In the Netspace, hosting a chat-room is already proving to be a sureshot strategy for building on-line communities-perfect for grabbing ad-revenues. The ability to use a keyboard and 'talk' in real-time with other people on a network of computers is one of the most potent symbols of the connectivity offered by the Net. No other medium-no, not even e-mail-marries real-time interactivity with cost-effectiveness, and then spices it up with anonymity.

Chat has already revolutionised person-to-person communication. It will do the same, albeit more slowly, for Business-To-Consumer, Business-To-Business, and Worker-To-Worker communication. There is no doubt that chat brings in the eyeballs, be it driven by homesick NRIs eager to talk to people back home, or young audiences playing the dating-and-cybermating game.

The New York-based consulting firm, Jupiter Communications, estimates that people using commercial on-line services spend between 25 and 30 per cent of their on-line time in chat-rooms. Another research firm, Forrester, reveals that more than 66 per cent of sites that add chat capabilities experience an immediate increase in traffic. Chat is the biggest attraction at leading Indian portals, like Indiatimes, Rediff, and 123India. And new players in the Netspace-like glorygreetings.com-are actually spearheading their marketing with their chat-rooms.

That's because chat-rooms can be big money-spinners. The primary business model is driven by banner advertising targeting interest-segregated on-line communities. In fact, the star of chat-room advertising is the dynamic ad, generated and served up on the basis of the topic under discussion in a chat-room. Sure, the speed of entry and exit of participants has put question-marks on whether these ads are going out to receptive audience or not, but the density of advertising at popular chat-rooms on the Net suggests that advertisers are keen on using the medium.

Add to that the new opportunity that's emerging-hosting chat services for small business organisations, or for individuals looking to strike transglobal business deals-and it's obvious that being a gracious chat-host can be a paying proposition. Don't forget, either, that virtually any portal or specialised services site you create today will involve real-time exchanges-either between you and your customers, or among your customers and partners. A chat-room has become an intrinsic part of an e-Commerce presence on the Net.

CHATWARE CHOICES. Setting one up is relatively painless and cheap. Companies without the resources to purchase and maintain the software can lease chat-rooms from on-line services like Talk City or e-share. Depending on the number of pages served-ranging between 5,000 and 50,000 per day-chat software can cost anything between Rs 28,000 and Rs 1 lakh. A second option is to make use of services like those of Tripod (tripod.com), which offers free personal chat-rooms to premium members ($36, or Rs 1,512 a year).

Cheaper-and even free-options are available too, in the form of zero-cost chat-room software offered by companies like Ichat (Ichat.com), MultiSoft Corp. (Multisoft corp.com), or EarthWeb (Chatplanet.com). These companies make their money by placing ads on the chat-windows created by using their package. Implementation is a breeze: log in to the site, accept the agreement, and click-and you'll receive, on e-mail, a few lines of HTML code. Paste them onto your chat page, and your room is up and running.

Indeed, the plethora of off-the-shelf software means that you may end up re-inventing the wheel if you write your own program. The only real reason to do that is for a technological breakthrough, such as the one achieved by Hymermix: its chatware, Gooey, is unique because it allows visitors to any Website-so long as they all have the chatware downloaded and installed on their PCs-to chat with one another.

TECH TRICKS. Whichever of these you choose, the technology behind them will be similar. Every user of your chat service gets a log-in screen-you can decide whether it is necessary for them to register beforehand and use a password to log in, as Rediff chat does, or whether to do away with this requirement, as is the case with Indiatimes chat-which enables them to enter the chat-room. The former option enables you to create a database of customer-profiles, which is useful for selling advertising although few chat-users reveal their real identities.

The interface that chat-rooms use is usually one of the 3 kinds: a special plug-in to the browser which has to be downloaded; or a Java applet transmitted from your server to the user's PC everytime she logs on, and disappears when she logs off; or just a plain HTML page, which updates itself at regular intervals to display what everyone is saying.

The process at work is simple: in normal cases, every input from every user is transmitted to the server on which the chat-room software resides, and from there is broadcast to everyone who is logged on. However, every major chat software offers more sophisticated options: the most important of these is the capability of allowing one-on-one exchanges, which are shielded from other participants, and the power to ignore one or more specified users so that if a particular user does not wish to hear what one or more of the others have to say, she can do so.

While even plain-vanilla chatware gives these options, the more features you can pack into your chat-room, the more will be its attractions. Par for the course at present are the facility to have multiple rooms, which users can enter and exit at will; the ability for users to create their own rooms with either public or restricted access; and the ability for users to search for one another. But you can differentiate your chat-rooms more by including, inter alia, voice-chat facilities-chatware like Freetal and ChitChat allow users to talk and listen to one another-or even animated role-play. Users of Magma's chatware can adopt names and matching graphical personas, with the room on their screens as a visual construct.

Or, at a functionally value-added level, try using chatware like Magma Communications', which allows messages to have embedded HTML tags. Likewise, differentiation is available through features like Parachat's chatware, which allows the Java window to float, freeing the browser for visiting other sites. Technology, though, isn't the only source of differentiation. Unique content-like celebrity chats, for instance-can also bring in traffic, as Rediff and Indiatimes are proving.

Remember, though, that creating a chat-room implies inviting large volumes of concurrent traffic: the Rediff chat site, for instance, has upto 250 users logged in at any given point, hogging bandwidth. And global chat sites like those of Talkcity's or Yahoo's have upwards of 5,000 users at peak hours. So, it is a smart idea to host your chat-room on a separate server, using dedicated lines, from that on which the rest of your e-Biz ventures are hosted. Now, if you're ready, let's chat.

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