Feeling chatroom nostalgia? Dump.fm allows chatters — pining for grainy animated GIFs and photoshopped images past their 15 minutes of viral fame — to talk with each other using their favourite pictures.

This latest Internet phenomenon is definitely a web 2.0 update: Think of it as a microblog photo entry on speed, with a twist. Dump.fm encourages users to “chat” with images of what were once Internet fads, in a fast-paced environment that screams Information Superhighway.

The site was recently launched by artist Ryder Ripps, in collaboration with artist/director Stefan Moore and programmer Scott Ostler. Ripps is a 23-year-old New York-based artist, whom wired.co.uk crowned the “Indiana Jones of the Internet” for founding Internet Archaeology, an online museum of “graphic artifacts” dating back to when Geocities and Angelfire ruled the web.

As the digital native gets older, it’s inevitable that a fondness for a time when they were sassygal_69@hotmail.com. Dump.fm images reflect this tech nostalgia with shared jpegs and gifs that reference the perverse, 4chan Internet underbelly.

“Love it or hate it, but LOLCats is a part of our history,” says Ripps of the cute kitty animations’ lingering viral fame. “Say what you will about it being rudimentary and ugly, but (these) are real references that elicit a strong emotional response, especially if you grew up with (the Internet).”

But doesn’t the mash up of unrelated images into a real-time, hyper-speed stream diminish the images’ value? Not necessarily, suggests Ostler. He believes dump.fm users communicate in casual back-and-forth fashion. “It’s not as transient as it appears to be. There are long-term patterns… and sometimes one person [can often] direct and completely change the flow and content of a conversation.”

Ripps believes this shared image searching of world wide web junk is a salvaging of Internet memories. It’s acknowledging an emotional idealism to online pasts, like his own as a nine-year-old in an AOL chatroom.

“It didn’t really matter what the conversation was, but the novelty that someone on the other side of the earth was sharing that with you” was what made it special, Ripps explains.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.