We at Socialbang.com recently launched our next generation chat room, it aims to provide a more efficient mechanism to meet new people online.
Socialbang is a cross between a traditional chat room, a social network, a casual game and a dating site. Users upload a picture of themselves and can then explore various chat rooms where they can move around and chat with other users also represented by their pictures. Apart from chatting users have a range of actions including smiles, kisses and punches they can use to express how they feel towards others users in the room. Every action within Socialbang uses energy, so sending another user a kiss costs the sender some energy but it will reward the receiver with extra energy also. Using an aggressive action such as a punch also costs energy to send but reduces that of the receiver.
Every users gets their own room for free which they can decorate this with a range of items, including notice boards, pictures, furniture and more.
Item are purchased using Socialbang "credits" which can be obtained in a number of ways including winning contests, referring friends, posting a link on your blog and more.

The public rooms are fairly self regulated because if a user is behaving inappropriately others users will act against them and result in that user being ejected from the room. In private rooms the owner can determine who can enter the room based on their age, location, gender etc. They also has special powers including the ability to ban a particular user.
There is lots much more to Socialbang than what I've described so far, but I'll save that for future articles. In the mean time please check out Socialbang chat and let us know what you think. Enjoy.