2009-10-04, 02:40 AM
A shoutbox you just shoot something up at it, and occasionally the box updates itself to let you know what others have "shouted" at it. A chat is a time-stamped two-way conversation. A shoutbox is really not good for a website, because if people have a page open, it will be updating itself all day long by some fixed interval. There are other ways to implement a shoutbox, but basically they are all one way streets. They can't be realtime, because if so every person viewing the webpage would be constantly bombarding the server with requests for updates. Also a shoutbox is on the website (stored in a database) so it wouldn't help to let people know what's happening if the website is down.