Irish Chat - History
1996 - 'Mayo on the Move'
Mayo Ireland Ltd set up the 'Mayo on the Move' website in 1995 and launched it on Valentine's Day, 14th February 1996. The site was soon gathering 1000s of visitors per month all interested in County Mayo.
1998 - Irish Chat
We decided to provide our visitors the opportunity to chat with one another on all things pertaining to Ireland and the Irish. Over time the site developed into a popular meeting place for anyone looking for interesting and lively chat on any topic.
The early years!
As its popularity increased some members began flooding the chat room with unwanted messages, bad-mouthing everyone and anyone, constantly coming in with different names just to cause trouble and generally being a right pain.
In other words as the number of users of IC increased there was an overall drop in quality. As a result of this many regular users and potential new users were put off using IC altogether.
Irish Chat - the social networking hub
For a while we introduced a subscription based service and set up a message board for members to hold discussion on all kinds of topics related and unrelated to Ireland. In April 2006 we took this to a new level by providing the facility to add friends, create photo albums etc - a true social networking powerhouse but since surpassed by facebook and others.
Ireland Calls - 2007
As "IC" became more of a social networking site we decided to move away from "Irish Chat" and looked for a name that would reflect the changes. We put a few alternatives to members and it was decided to go with Ireland Calls as this reflected the pull that Ireland has on the Irish diaspora and the site could still be called IC for short. Hence, thanks to Graham, one of our early chatters, IC got a makeover and became Ireland Calls.
Ireland Calls - 2010
Perhaps we could have run IC differently and perhaps IC would now be bigger than facebook et al if we had. Still, no regrets, however we have decided to call it a day on the social networking side of things and go back to our Irish Roots, our Irish Chat Roots that is. So the Ireland Calls site is to be closed down although the domain will live on. (along with Irish Blogger which we didn't get time to develop fully)
Ireland Calls - 2011
Ireland Calls wasn't closed down in 2010 after all and we managed to keep it going right through to May 2011. It did however definitly closr on May 31st 2011.
Irish Chat - the future?
We don't know if there is a future for Irish Chat. The chatroom stopped working in September 2012 and we weren't able to get in touch with the hosting company to sort it out. As a consequence we don't have an Irish Chat chatroom anymore.
We are still open to set one up if we can find a suitable home for it so if you want to keep in touch please check out Irish Chat on facebook. If we do set up a replacement chatroom this is where we will announce it.
Irish Chat and Ireland Calls on Facebook
In the meantime, one of our longest serving members in Irish Chat (Andrea) had set up a chat room and runs a weekly quiz every Saturday night.
You can check this out in the Ireland Calls Group on Facebook.