With the advent of Instant Messaging and blogging, the use of “old” services like forums and especially chat has withered a bit. However, there are many chat options for people to interact with others, discuss ideas and share common interests. This is especially true for teenagers, who are driven to teen chat rooms and web forums.
In line with this, I saw a UK website (called TeenSay) that caters to teens and they have, among other things, several teen chat rooms. Their chat rooms are free and you don’t have to register or sign up unlike other IRC clients.

Teensay (a.k.a. TS) is a free website for teens that features a chat, forums, news and reviews, online based store, videos and photo-profile pages. This site was previously known as Teensite and in 2003 it was re-Christened Teensay (the old name, Teensite now refers to another teen-related website). Since that time, several new features have been incorporated, such as Videos, Graphics and Avatars and other interesting . They have a few rules and regulations to keep the chatroom safe and easy to use at the same time. People can email the administrators if anyone in the chat room is behaving suspiciously or if the site has a problem.

Aside from the Chat Room, Teensay also has message boards, each with topics from teen-related health issues to getting to know each other. You can also engage into debates or talk about the latest world news. Of course, talking about relationships isn’t the only subject. Various hobbies, from music to books to movies and shopping, also have their place. Teen Say pretty much features it all in its message boards. The chat rooms have almost 30000 users a day, and the forums have 260,000 posts and 6000 threads currently on the boards. The forums recently also have an 18+ security feature to protect younger viewers from seeing adult-oriented threads.

In summary, this site (and many others like it), provide a point of encounter for many teenagers out there and it proves that chat rooms are still very much alive.