How to make a room that works

Be aware that creating a successful room can easily take months or years. The teenconnection room, for example, has been operating for for several years. The Dimmu Borgir chat was spawned from the band's web site, which has been in operation since 1999.

If you're still sure you want to give it a shot, choose a general topic for your room. Make a list of possible topics; make sure they're all areas that you know about or can learn about. Be creative, and offer something that no one else does. For example, you could start a chat exclusively dealing with relationship advice. Or one dedicated to people who have rodents for pets. Or one for people who are interested in starting a business. Don't make a "general chat" room; there are too many already. Focusing your topic will attract more interesting users, and those users will be more likely to come back.

After that, survey what's already available. The active room list can help you out with this. If you see more than two or three rooms already focusing on your particular topic, drop it and choose another: that area is is already saturated.

The obvious thing to do, then, is to actually set up and register your room; you can do that at the liveHarmony Getting Started page. You should also build a web page around your room. There are many easy, free tools available to help you with this (some popular ones are GeoCities and Angelfire).

(In fact, most of our popular rooms have been built the other way around: a chat room was added to an already-popular web site. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. By creating your room first, you gain the exposure that the liveHarmony room list provides -- it's not necessary for a user to visit your web site to enter your room. On the other hand, search engines don't pick up chat room content, so you're limited to those users already visiting the room list; someone searching for web sites on your topic may not find your room.)

You'll need to visit your room at least daily and make conversation with those who enter. While your room is still small, it may be worthwhile to set up scheduled times for discussion. This helps work around a frustrating catch-22 in creating a new area: people don't like to join until there's a critical mass, and until people join there won't be a critical mass.

After that, it's up to you to determine what your room needs and provide it. There's no easy way to create a popular room. We've learned that: this document is based on our experiences building the liveHarmony service. In October 2002, liveHarmony was a single-page placeholder; three years later, it receives over 80,000 hits a week. Along the way, we've had to deal with abusive users, server failures, legal threats, and more. We've remained focused, though, on our niche: providing service to web site owners. We hope that you will be able to find your audience and build a strong community. And we hope that you'll build it on liveHarmony.

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