Glossary

Chat

Website designers and others commonly use online chat to communicate with each other or for answering consumer questions on a technical blog. Online chat is any kind of communication over the Internet. Although at one time, online chat generally referred to a one on one chat as in two website designers talking to each other, it can also refer to text based group chat such as a group of website designers discussing things with more than two total website designers at a time. Now there are even special web sites put together by website designers called online chat sites where users go for the sole purpose to chat with others. Website designers are constantly trying to improve the security on these chat sites as these sites are having a great culture impact.

Despite being virtual, chat can spill into the outside world. With the technology world that we live in today, there is an enormous amount of people that use chat web sites. Security is a major concern for website designers and for most parents raising up children today. Because of technologies today, there is much unwise and uninhibited behavior on the internet as a result of anonymity. Although chat came about through website designers and developers for the plain purpose of communication, almost evryone uses it nowdays and any subject can be found. This poses a large problem and security concern not just for parents of children, but for all types of preditor crimes to be prepatrated using the Internet chat sites to lure their victums willingly or un-willingly into giving up their personal information or in meeting the preditors themselves out in the outside world.

Website designers use all kinds of chat software and are working closely with designers to address security concerns. There is also the technology for video chat that has recently hit the markets of today's Internet and is in use. Website designers use software like Integrating Live Person, Trillian, Webtrends, and Skype, ChatStat v4.3 provides 2-way live chat with website visitors and allows use of Skype VoIP protocol to call back customers. Technology has changed all types of services including library services.

In particular, the use of the Internet has made a significant difference in the way that traditional services are provided. Reference service is a critical service that has been changed by technology. Digital or virtual reference has developed as a way of helping patrons not only on the desk, but in cyberspace through chat. Today, some feel that at its best, chat has been a way to waste time, the equivalent of being a teen-ager on the telephone but with a dozen chums at once. At worst, chat has been about cybersex, and lots of chat rooms have been seedy locations, virtual back alleys where pedophiles and sexual predators lurked.

But chat is changing, maturing, and diversifying. Internet businesses lack the one thing many shoppers require: a human touch. While traditional businesses can reach out to confused or interested consumers, web businesses can only watch as visitors become bogged down on product pages or in the checkout process before clicking away. E-commerce companies are now working with website designers to starting to reverse that pattern, by monitoring their consumer's surfing patterns, and engaging them in an online chat when the time is right. Many sites have for years offered online chat for customers and asked them for their opinion about services or products.

Get in touch with us right away