Students now have yet another way to stay in touch online, this time through a new chat room service run by TuftsLife.
TuftsLife last week launched the technology as a way to facilitate online communication between students, according to TuftsLife Chief Operating Officer Michael Vastola, a senior.
"It's a way for students to collaborate and to talk to each other across campus and across the world," Vastola, who is also the technical director for the Daily, said.
The chat rooms run on a program called Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which enables users to connect via topics, according to freshman Nicholas Davis, a member of the TuftsLife development team.
"There's a lot to it, obviously, and it's actually a powerful and diverse type of communication, but at its most basic, it's almost like a chat room," Davis said. "You set up different channels based on topic. It's a topic-based type of communication."
While the chat rooms' features are initially starting out small, offering simultaneous chat among multiple students, Vastola hopes to expand its use to university departments to attract a wider user base.
"We're in the process of reaching out to various departments and trying to get this feature used," Vastola said. "We just launched, so it hasn't really caught on yet."
Vastola is considering possibilities to enhance the chat rooms, such as invited "speakers" to answer students' questions online and hopes to encourage students studying abroad to use the chat rooms to stay connected to Tufts.
Though the new TuftsLife feature may lend itself to academic purposes more than its online-chat counterparts, like Google Chat and Skype, the service still offers a social component, Vastola said.
"I just thought it would be cool because you can connect with people that you wouldn't normally connect with," he said.
Vastola envisioned Tufts Chatrooms this year and quickly brought it to life. TuftsLife downloaded IRC from the Internet and modified and configured it to best serve Tufts, he said.
"It didn't take long from conception to implementation," Vastola said.
One feature allows users to send computer-generated insults to each other, and the chat rooms can even be used for online dating, according to Vastola.
Vastola described the chat rooms, which are restricted to members of the Tufts community and require a Tufts e-mail address to use, as a less-anonymous version of the website CollegeACB. He hopes IRC's added accountability will help the feature avoid the crudeness often associated with the website.
"It's somewhat like CollegeACB but there's no real anonymity," Vastola said. "If someone's libeling someone, we're in a position where we have peoples' names."
Senior Ryan Orendorff, a biomedical engineering major, said he has already used the Tufts Chatrooms to discuss projects with fellow engineers.
"It's an interesting way for students to talk to each other, but it isn't necessarily popular yet," Orendorff said.
Still, Vastola insisted that Tufts Chatrooms, which doesn't require users to download any programs, is relatively accessible to students who may not be completely comfortable with technology.
"We think once people get the hang of it, they'll really enjoy it," Vastola said. "We know it might be a little hard to use at first, but at the same time, you can just go in and start typing."
Davis said students' opinions and participation would be integral to the future of Tufts Chatrooms.
"I hope it goes beyond our reach, that students realize its potential and take it places that we at TuftsLife haven't even thought of yet," Davis said. "We have ideas of what it might become, but that doesn't mean it will. We want students to take control and make of it what they will."
