Seeking use of chat room

[AndreaU]

I'm trying to coordinate the use of a chat room (preferably free!) so my fellow college classmates and I can get together in real time. Does anyone have any experience, advice, suggestions as to where I should look? Is it easy? Do I have to have a website to do this or are there sites that will host a chat for free?

I checked classmates.com but all they seem to have are message boards. (Not that there's anything wrong with that! ;) )

Hopefully someone out there has some kind of info on how to do this! Thanks in advance!

:)

[oceanjasper]

I have taken distance courses for quite a few years and the main website we used for corresponding was smartgroups. Here is a link (http://www.smartgroups.com/).

It is really a message board, but it is private. You are able to control who you want in your group. There is also an email capability, so instead of going and reading the message board you get an instant email with each post (or you can get a summary of new posts). You can also store files in your group, so that they can be shared with everyone. Not sure if that is what you wanted, but it worked well for the groups I was in.

There is also ICQ, which is more of an instant messaging program. You can choose multiple users to "chat" with and you aren't in a public chat room, where other people can join in. Link here (http://www.icq.com/).

There is also MSN Messenger, which works the same as ICQ.

[SandyM]

Hi Andrea,

MSN has chatrooms (Alysha's We're Cooking Now (http://groups.msn.com/WereCookingNow) is on there).

Anyway, I went there this morning, and I see that they're now charging $19.95 per year, when it used to be free.

There are message boards and chat rooms there.

Just so ya know. :)

[HejazSunKat]

There's a feature in Yahoo Instant Messenger (and probably just about every other IM program) that allows you to invite people for a group chat. I'm sure all of the participants would have to download and install Yahoo Messenger then I think all you'd have to do is 'invite' the people in your friends list to join the chat. You'd probably set up a time for it so you'd all be online at once. I found this set of instructions for it in Yahoo Messenger:

http://search2.cc.dcn.yahoo.com/cct_search.php?ui_mode=answer&prior_transaction_id=164354354&action_code=5&highlight_info=16786542,25,38&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fhelp.yahoo.com%2Fhelp%2Fus%2Fmes senger%2Fwin%2Fchat%2Fchat-09.html&answer_id=2320941#__highlight

[slknight]

Originally posted by HejazSunKat
There's a feature in Yahoo Instant Messenger (and probably just about every other IM program) that allows you to invite people for a group chat. I'm sure all of the participants would have to download and install Yahoo Messenger then I think all you'd have to do is 'invite' the people in your friends list to join the chat.

I've used this before and it's pretty simple, and best of all FREE! :D

[SusanL]

we use it at school, I was going to recommend it.

[Angelina]

You could also look into IRC, which is free...try mirc.com