When a person requests access to a chat session, the time of the request is
used to determine which chat room the person is placed. Other parameters
are used to determine the surrounding factors, or context, within which
the person initiated the request, such as the particular television
program that the person was watching at the time of the request. By
forming chat rooms based on the time of entry and the context in which the
request is made, the chat rooms are likely to contain people with a common
topic to discuss, such as the television news story being broadcast at
that time. These time-of-entry chat rooms can also be structured to be of
limited duration, obviating the overhead burden of deleting topic-specific
chat rooms when the topic ceases to be of interest.
