This is a guest post from Gaz Bailey. Gaz runs a small netlabel (dealing mainly in digital product) and free music site called Needle In The Groove.

I’m a music promoter who recently started using Twitter on a regular basis to hawk my wares. I wasn’t sure how a system of communication in 140 characters or less would be applicable to my field, and indeed expressed severe doubts about it to one or two of my friends, but having messed with it for a few weeks I rapidly realised that it’s very effective for generating interest with a relatively small amount of time and input investment. However, one of the first things that struck me is the similarity between Twitter and the classic internet relay chat (IRC) systems from back in my first days of regular internet use.

Internet relay chat

I remember sitting down at a local college in 1996, which had a network of internet-enabled machines, and registering my first Hotmail account to be able to use Alamak chat. White background, black text – you even had to refresh your browser (IE 3?) to update the conversation. Javascript soon took care of the real-time updates and as the Millennium approached, these basic chat rooms evolved into less text driven, avatar-based online clubs – and later worlds, where users could interact in 2D or 3D by performing actions.

An evolutionary step too far

These developments seemed to thin the userbase out and by the time this chat revolution was in full swing people like me had used up the possibilities of IRC as a social medium, and then turned away entirely when the hosts starting incorporating too many gimmicky ‘gamesy’ elements. I know many of the younger users liked all that, but I just thought it was silly. I didn’t want an avatar that looked like a manga version of me, I just wanted to chat in writing, preferably in real time. And then voila! – the world of instant messaging, both on mobile phones and platforms like ICQ and MSN, appeared to fill the gap.

The evolution of IRC seemed like a step too far for me at the time, away from pure communication and closer to the similarly rapidly evolving world of what were once called MUDS and then became MMORPGs. I think Twitter’s sudden and massive popularity some years later may go to show that chat rooms evolved a step too far away from their users, and that many like me didn’t really want or need all the frills and extras.

Enter Twitter

The way I see it Twitter is, at its core, really an IRC system from 10 or 15 years ago, mostly doing away with the ‘live public forum’ aspect of the old systems, but connected via rapid Google indexing to the much larger public forum of the whole internet. The defining difference between the old and the new is really in the much more diverse content of today’s internet – and the behaviour and level of reliance on it of its users – both of which are entirely different animals these days.

In this new world, Twitter’s update of IRC is a very well-balanced tool for those looking to recommend their daily discoveries, or to promote their band, or just spout opinions and get some feedback. Combined with sites like Monitter.com (a Twitter-related site which allows users to display tweets containing certain keywords in real time, scrolling down the screen), the similarity becomes even more pronounced. Hash tags are infinitely more accessible chatroom ‘channels’ and, to push this analogy to its limit, ‘tweet spam’ is the reincarnation of the deliberate ‘off-topic’ conversation in a channel with a specific subject for its users.

So, when you next sit down for your daily tweetathon, nip over to the old Alamak chat (which is bizarrely pretty much still in its original form), and spare a thought for me and my old clan of friends sitting on college computers many years ago, helping to lay the groundwork for the social media revolution.