Recently the PS3 received a firmware update that included backing up PSN purchased movies to an external hard-drive (thank you) and 16 concurrent player text-chat. Yes, text-chat.

This features allows you to create a text-chat room and invite people from your friends list. People on your friends list can invite others as well into the chat room so not everyone in the chat room will be on your personal friends list. With this, users are able to text each-other in-game and can have up to 3 chat rooms going with a total of 16 people in each.

Isn’t this 2009? Why the hell do I have text-chat on my console? Yes, it is 2009 and why the hell do you have text messaging on your phone? Text-chat is another means of communication and it is one I like and prefer for the following reasons:

• I don’t like talking on the phone or through a mic period. I prefer written communication in everything I do.
• It’s easier to understand written communication with those whose first language may not be English.
• I can track a conversation better. If I am in a voice-chat party and playing a game I am not really listening to what any of you are saying. My concentration is on the game. With text-chat, I can ignore the messages and when I feel like it, I can catch up on the entire conversation and respond whenever I like.
• No awkward silence during voice-chat. You feel as if you are required to talk constantly.

So why are people dissing it? Don’t know. Any feature they don’t deem useful to them is apparently a useless feature overall. Would I like to see voice chat? Of course. I would love to see cross-game voice chat as it can be a really useful feature but would I use it….nope. While I have certainly enjoyed chatting it up with the different communities I am apart of and even adding people from the text-chat to my friends list, I can still see there are needed improvements:

• Cutback on the filtering please! You can’t even type the word “submit” without it being blocked.
• If you have an active chat session open, pressing the PS button should take you to that session automatically.
• When you log into PSN, you should automatically be logged into your chat rooms or at least have an optional setting to do so.
• Along with the persistent home status screen (constant display showing friends online, unread messages), add participant count for each chat room.

As it stands now, I think text-chat is a very welcome feature for myself. I also hope that this sets up their framework to introduce cross game voice-chat as well. Until then, I will continue to use 1980′s tech on my console, phone, and computer. IM and Text are the wave of the future and there’s nothing you can do can stop it!