There are chat rooms, group meeting places where folks gather to spill their guts, support their opinions or postulate about every topic under the sun.
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There's a website (hockeyfights.com) devoted entirely to the not-so-fine art of fighting on skates on ice, and there are chat rooms where the best fights are analyzed and picked apart.
Bernie Marcus used to warn salesclerks that he would bite off the finger of the next one he caught pointing a customer toward where to find something. (The clerk is supposed to walk you there and chat you up about your project along the way.) Marcus would have a mouthful of digits if he had followed this reporter over the last few weeks.
"We monitor intelligence, we're aware there's chat between the fans and we're very conscious with previous matches this season between the two clubs, there's been something like 35 arrests, " said Supt Jones.
You can call or start a chat from there to any of your friends on Skype.
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There the curious can chat with a missionary, or browse some 80, 000 profiles to find Mormons who are like them.
"If you look at the 500 million people who are on Facebook and the way that people text each other and instant message and use video chat, there is now an evolution of media, " Kotick said.
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So Kazakh films tend to be short on unnecessary chit-chat, and there is no tradition of film comedy.
This morning, there's a live Web chat with the Theroux at 8am ET via The Telegraph.
"With the telex you could actually chat with the editor there and then but with e-mail, if something goes wrong during transmission, you can't know it immediately and you get a query on why you did not file, " he says.
And there was little attention paid to his chat show - Meet Ricky Gervais.
But outside some scattered chat-room complaints, there is no sign of any widespread opposition to the practice, or move to ban it.
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Then there was time for a quick interpreted chat about what I was doing in India and where I lived, before a sweet was pressed into my hands and holy ash dispensed to me.
The story he was going after was inside this chat room, and he went there.
For example, there is web conferencing with video and web chat.
He added that there had been "limited concern" expressed on chat rooms about the desire of the authorities to access the data itself.
There are to be yet more papers and more chat about how to finish reforming the House of Lords, in which, after Mr Blair's half-baked stab at it, 92 hereditary peers still sit.
You know we had a - I had a chat with the manager on Friday - sorry I can hardly hear you David, there's a police helicopter, it's making a lot of noise - yeah I had a chat with the manager on Friday and hopefully we'll get things sorted out for another season.
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Is there any chance I could come in and we could chat about it?
There now seems to be a more dangerous place to chat on your phone than on the highway.
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The new system will be modelled more on chat than traditional e-mail which means there will be no subject lines, cc or bcc fields.
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Keys has written publicly about participating in discussions within chat forums used by Anonymous but presented his actions there as reportorial.
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There is also an advice page warning about the dangers of chat rooms and fake users, but you have to click through four pages before you can see it and it's not simple to find.
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"Google has a chat application, Web-based search, and there is no one cohesive Google mobile application, which is important to have in a mobile environment where you want to be able to switch between applications, " she says.
Certainly there were those who said he didn't do enough to chat up people in the tearoom.
It was there several days later that she checked her spyware and found the chat messages with her photos, which led her to contact the FBI.
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Now, there's a lot left to learn about Apple's FaceTime video chat service.
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