Chat room anonymity seems to make for the exchange of banal information interspersed with very long periods of silence. Surprising as it may seem, many people can't get enough of it. Up to a few years ago, if you wanted to chat online, you had to use Internet Relay Chat - a special Internet application that predates the Web. Over the past few years, however, the Web has been assimilating chat functions. It's often clunky and slow, but it does work.
Message boards are Web pages which collect and group messages about a given topic.
Interested parties, or simply those who want to have their two cents worth, can submit a posting. UseNet is a separate Internet application that's available from most browsers. Organized into special interest forums, known as newsgroups, UseNet newsgroups can vary widely in substance. For more serious discussion, there are email discussion lists . These are electronic societies of correspondence in which like-minded people communicate by way of email.