Place Revisited

The Palace is a multi-user three dimensional chatroom. True 3D? No way. You dont stumble into chairs or tables actually, the palace environment is just a graphic, a GIF image in most cases, against which you and the other avatars act out your little skit.

A recent visit to the Palace home page (www.thepalace.com) proved a surprise. There was an Instant Chat option, ostensibly employing Java, using which I could start chatting immediately without using any additional software at all. This was a boon how come nobody ever thought about it before? Earlier, Palace chat meant that I had to download a 3.5 Megabyte Zip file, install it, and then connect to any of the Palace servers.

 

It looked very user-friendly then. Now, after two more years of surfing, the definition of user-friendliness on the Web has undergone some dramatic transformations. I want to click on the hyperlinked GIF of a palace site, and start chatting instantly. And I dont even want to set up my software as helper apps which will do precisely that. It should just happen by itself.

It still doesnt happen that way. I can click on an icon, and chat, but Java apps are notoriously slow to open and run. Same with Palace chats. But its a start.

Click on any of the twelve hyperlinked Palace names, and get transported there but not instantly. The app draws its window painfully, then seems to take an eon to download the background image. But then, one has to say, the Palace background images are some of the most beautiful Web art that one has ever seen. The several palaces, some of them run by noted entertainment giants like Warner Bros. and CO are exquisitely designed. However, the membership in the new Palaces are often pathetically low so low, that you are tempted to call your colleagues abroad and invite them for a day-long business conference in some of them without any fear of unwanted interference.

Most of the instant chat Palaces that I checked out were completely empty. Sad, but then, most of the Palace veterans are those who have been hanging around the site for ages and who have paid up the 25 dollars for the additional features offered such as the ability to send sounds across, and the ability to use several scanned images instead of the round smiley faces that the Palace provides its guests.

There is more to Palace than just chat, however. Palace community events are commonplace, and one of the recently featured topics of a community discussion was sexual harassment in the workplace presided over by the Labor attorney Rich Mathias. Labor Attorney who? Well, somewhere in the States, silly! However, such privileges come only to registered members of the Palace. The only community that used to do anything serious of the sort earlier were the Apple eWorld men who have all disappeared with the demise of on-line service.

Anyone, with a server on the Net, can run a Palace. The Palace server software is available for sale, and for a global company, a permanent conference room on the Net is a cheap way to conduct a meeting or communicate.

IRC? Boring. Web chat? Tedious. Call it gimmicky, but the multiuser chatroom at www.thepalace.com has its charms.