I never spent a ton of time in chat rooms. My formative years were spent hanging out on AIM, whittling away the time I was supposed to be doing homework by swapping IMs with the same two or three people. People that I only saw at school in passing, until we connected online and formed lifelong connections through our more ephemeral selves. Connections that formed over MySpace pages that were somehow more intimate, secret, and messy than the sterile, cynical Facebooks we have today. They were both advertising engines, but Facebook is too in-your-face about it.

Those functions were replaced by SMS before SMS was replaced by the torrent of Snapchat and Kik and Skype and Facebook Messanger. But I never found myself in a community around those tools. And I've never been able to recreate those kinds of friendships.

I do have some promising friendboats coming up, though.