If you can recall how life was back in the 90s, you are no doubt aware that in the early days of getting online, all you had was the option to chat. There was not enough bandwidth back in those days for doing live webcam conferences, and people had not yet received the option to simply text one another on their phones. So chatting was all that one could do, as far as online communication went. Of course, things have changed dramatically over the past decade and a half, and with those changes has come a lot more options, many of which completely forsake chatting.
You might even say that chatting is something of a dying art form, relegated to the extremely lonely and the extremely bored members of our society. Whereas that was once the most efficient means of meeting somebody, a lot of people these days are far more happy to simply go from casually e-mailing one another to sending text after text, whether or not anybody actually wants to read them all. The simple fact of the matter is, people do not chat nearly as much as they used to, even if they like to use that particular medium.
Perhaps instant messaging is just old hat, and nobody wants to sit on yesterday’s trends any more. Or maybe the fact that you can not take your computer with you everywhere the way you can with your phone makes it just too inconvenient to chat. Or perhaps the advantage is that chatting means you might have to listen to (and wait for) a response which is expected to be immediate. At any rate, chatting has largely been relegated to nothing but business communications.