the.com/chat
where conversations went to live forever and die instantly, all at once
means To talk in an easy, informal way — or, online, to exchange typed messages in real time.
from From the French verb chatter, itself a shortening of chatter in the sense of idle chitchat — and that English chatter is echoic, a word built to sound like the rapid, clattering noise of small birds and busy tongues. So at root 'chat' is just the noise of talking, trimmed down to a single brisk syllable. (No relation to the French chat meaning 'cat,' despite the tempting coincidence.)
- old french
- chat once meant idle, chattering talk
- typing dots
- the most suspenseful three pixels online
- first chat
- emerged on 1970s mainframe terminals as talk programs
- read receipts
- weaponized silence into a readable timestamp
- now a verb
- "my chat" means an audience, not a friend
openai's chatgpt — ai chatbot launched november 2022, reached 1 million users in 5 days
amazon alexa — voice assistant in 100+ million devices worldwide
google bard — conversational ai launched march 2023 as google's chatgpt competitor