> You mentioned in your original post that one of the things you don't like about LiveJournal and AIM is how exclusionary they can be, and how much they can lead to people feeling left out. I see RinkChat's private rooms as a much worse culprit on the same problem, and the reasons for it being a problem are often accidental.
>
> If somebody creates a private room in RinkChat because they want to talk to a few other SPECIFIC people, that's fine.

I disagree with your assessment of private rooms simply because the use you call "fine" *is* the appropriate use of private rooms. This one:

> Create the room, invite those people, everybody's happy. However, if somebody wants to create a private room to chat with a broader group of their friends . . . For me, that list would include at least twenty or thirty people, and probably a heck of a lot more than that.

...is all wrong. If you've got that many people you want to talk to, how is that significantly different from using a public room? I don't use private rooms that way, and I don't think I've seen other people use them that way either.

For me, private rooms assist in the first scenario you describe. Maybe I want to talk to one, two, five other people, and the reason isn't so much that I want to exclude others but that I specifically want to talk to *those* people at that time. As for whatever other people are in chat, I might also enjoy them, too, but when there are 25 people in one room, a personal conversation is NOT going to be possible. It *never* happens in real life -- put 25 people in a room, and they splinter off naturally, every time -- and so it can't be expected to work online.

The thing is, multiple public rooms doesn't freaking work, for reasons that elude me. It is rare for there to be multiple public rooms that don't quickly merge into one again.

I'm getting off the topic. The point is, I agree that the use of private rooms you describe isn't quite right, but that's not how I see private rooms being used.