> For me, part of it is that I want to talk to my friends, and I don't want to talk to groups of people I don't especially care for. . . . That might sound cold, but it's frankly honest, . . . a lot of it simply becomes the noise level.

My thought on this is very close. As a rule, I do not like 20-person chats, and this would be the case even if I liked and enjoyed all 20 of them.

This, however, is what private rooms were made for. I am baffled by why private rooms aren't used to solve this problem. Actually, of everyone, you are probably the best at trying, and sometimes it pays off. But I don't understand why it doesn't happen more. The fact is, almost everybody agrees that the community is too large for a single room, yet 90% of the time only one room is in use.

> I have to wonder if your resistance to the community moving away from RinkChat is why you're never to be seen on AIM anymore these days.

It might be a factor, but it's not the main reason. The main reasons are that AIM is interruptive and non-communal. Regarding the first, if I'm logged into AIM, and someone decides to talk to me, wham, there the message is, and I have to deal with it right then, regardless of what I was doing at the time. Even if all I do to deal with it is ignore it and switch back to my original window, my mental train of thought has been interrupted, and I don't do well with that. I have a very masculine brain, in the sense that it does not switch gears easily. I much prefer the chat model, where, if I'm multi-tasking, I do something else, get to a stopping place, then catch up on everything that's happened in chat, publicly or privately.

Regarding AIM being non-communal, it is primarily a one-on-one thing. Too many times, I'd be on AIM talking to four other people, some of whom are also talking to each other or yet other people. It's like socializing with blinders on. You get what people are saying to you, but you can't sit and listen to other people's conversation, as you would if several people were piled into one room together. Even worse, you don't ever have the full attentions of the people you're talking to. You post an AIM message, and there's this random delay before you get something back, while that person chats with others -- or does something in another window, or goes away from the keyboard. This happens in RinkChat, too, but there's more information you get back: if the delay is because that person is also talking to someone else, you see that. If it's because the person went to get food or answer the door or whatever, you're more likely to be informed about this (since one public "/away" tends to happen more than the manual broadcast of "brb" into every open AIM window). Simply put, AIM is the most anti-social medium of communication I know. Now, granted, AIM supports chat rooms in addition to one-on-one communication, but these tend to get used about as often as RinkChat private rooms. The default is private conversation, and it tends to stay that way.

That is why I do not like AIM.

A third reason, which I'm only mentioning way down here because it might be a lack of experience in *using* AIM, rather than something inherent in its capabilities, is that I don't know a way to be on AIM and only visible to certain people at a certain time. I might want to log on to AIM for the singular purpose of pursuing an important-at-the-time conversation with one or two people. In RinkChat, that's a "Create Private Room" and an "/invite." In AIM, it's "log in and ignore everybody opening windows on your computer but those two people" which may also entail explaining why I am ignoring all these people I like.