In all honesty, I view it as the biggest forced butchering of the entire history of written language. In my experiences with conversing with somebody using it and speaking it myself in my early days of using Internet communiqués, I've found that it causes the speaker to sound unintelligent and lazy, even when sending a text message via cell phone (you have a 1000 character limit for a reason; unless you're sending somebody a novel via text message, use it!). It's often difficult to understand somebody using chatspeak, especially when they misspell a word and you begin to start guessing at what they were trying to tell you because it seems completely foreign. Then after you send a message back saying, "What? What did you say?" they might ridicule you for being completely incompetent of understanding their horrendously broken English by replying with "lol omg ur so stpd y cnt u undrstnd wat im saing? its so ez."
I'm perfectly fine with the acronyms that come with it like "lol" or "brb." however; acronyms have been used in speech and writing for as long as we can remember because they prove to be practical.
In short, I would rather write and type in an intelligible format than revert to chatspeak.