Anonymous Chat Via Telephone

Services like America Online have known for years that what a lot of people really like to use a computer for is to communicate. Online Chat lets you talk, debate, flirt or pontificate with virtual rooms full of other people with a great degree of anonymity. Now, AT&T, has found a way to marry the new with the old. It can hook up online chat participants....on the old fashioned telephone...so they can talk anonymously. WorldNet head Dan Schulman...

"What we're doing with Chat n Talk is putting the voice back into communications. Allowing people not just to communicate with their eyeballs but with their ear drums as well."

The latest version, available now on the lycos.com chat site connects up to seven people at a time on the phone...

"What we do, and this is the beauty of it, is we keep the talk path confidential. In other words, if you want to talk to another person, you don't have to reveal your telephone number to them but our network then sets up the phone calls on second phone lines and instead of chatting with your keyboard you're now actually talking to each other on the telephone."

The catch, is money. Instead of being free, each person is now paying 25 cents a minute to participate, after a fifty cent set up fee.