Persistent chat is here to stay

On the London Underground, advertisements for Reuters Messaging adorn the walls next to the escalators. In my feed reader, conversations about Campfire, the new service from 37Signals, trickle in. Chat for business is hot.
    The Reuters messaging platform has been around since 2002. Along the way, the platform has opened up to the MSN and AOL IM clients. Last I heard (mid 2005) the service had some 60,000 users signed up.
    A powerful and popular feature of the Reuters service is persistent chat. (Michael Sampson of Shared Spaces points out that Parlano already offered a similar service when Reuters introduced the feature.) It is designed for groups of people to dip in and out of a discussion about a well-defined topic. A transcript of the chat is stored for posterity and made available for searching. Organisations making use of persistent chat see it as a factor limiting email clutter. Good behaviour is to start a persistent chat room before a many-to-many email discussion gets out of control. Some Reuters clients have hundreds of chat rooms going.
    With 37Signals joining the market with a purely browser-based solution priced for small business, adoption of persistent chat is sure to spread.

Tags: IM persistent chat reuters 37signals Parlano email Campfire