Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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And laughing. I have never heard so much laughing in my whole life.

So the two of us were out celebrating her 14th birthday, and I asked her why this summer was the summer of a lifetime.

She shrugged. "It was the chat room."

"The chat room?" I knew her class had a place online where they met and gabbed, but I never thought of it as pivotal.

A chat room, in case you're not a kid, is a Web-based bulletin board system that allows you to trade one-liners with others who know about the board. They can answer you in real time, or later, when they log on and see your remarks.

They seem like very silly places, to outsiders. But to regulars, they are very fun and highly addictive.

"Sure. People I didn't think I maybe had much in common with during the school year, online we found we had lots in common."

I asked her why she supposed that was. She said she didn't know.

Then I remembered my own BBSing. I have been logging onto the same two mom 'n' pop bulletin boards for upwards of thirteen years. I know exactly how much fun it is to communicate online, with neither a body nor a face -- just mind to mind. You quickly achieve a level of comfort that in some ways surpasses relationships in the regular world. People don't judge you by your color or accent or hairdo or number of tattoos. You're -- you.

Daniele, a certified nonconformist -- or is that an oxymoron? -- was able to find a group of likeminded girls because of the freedom and fun of online chat.

This information is especially valuable to me, because my son Jon, 10, has just discovered he will not be sharing homeroom with some of his favorite friends, as hoped. So his school year looms as a time of prospective misery.

If you don't have a kid in school these days, you need to know that many kids go through the system tethered to best friends. Perhaps to provide a measure of security in our fast-changing world, kids form long-term friendships that are almost like marriages. Then they lean on those relationships until they wear them out. Why? Because they seem safe, and other kids seem sort of scary.

But this chat room idea has the potential to bypass the scariness. That's what Daniele found, and maybe the same thing will work for Jon. So I visited a Web site called BeSeen, and within five minutes created a chat room just for Jon's fifth grade class. It's a vehicle for G-rated banner advertisements, but it's free.

My idea is to have Jon pass out a note to all the fifth graders at his school inviting them to use the chat room as a kind of electronic homeroom: a place to meet online, away from school and away from parents, and chew the fat. Or whatever kids today call that.

Chat rooms have their downside. Being 24-hour affairs, they are unsupervisable. If a bully, vulgarian, or other category of lamer decides to camp out on it, you pretty much have to tolerate him, or her. And they mop of hours of time. Many nights this summer, Daniele was up till the wee-wee hours, gossiping.

But it's so much fun, and the extreme alternative is going through school feeling to shy to peep.

I asked her what she thought about the coming explosion of bandwidth, that will allow online videoconferencing. Everyone will be able to see your hair, your braces, the pimple on your nose.

She didn't like that. We both agreed that what drives the chat rooms is anonymity. Your friends quickly figure out who you are behind your phony handle, but the handle is still critical. It's a mask that, paradoxically, enables you to be yourself.

As bandwidth expands, look for new ways to be anonymous. Kids with naturally curly hair may opt for the video image of themselves. Others will create animations and video disguises to maintain the power of the mask.

So all you parents out there who are worrying how your kids will do socially this school year, check out BeSeen and create a chat area for your kids' class. Or let your kid do it. It's easy, it's free, it's reasonably safe, and it goes a long way to loosen the social strictures that lead to loneliness, crummy self-esteem, depression and worse.

I'm not kidding -- do it.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.