Firetalk

» see firetalk.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The reviews said Firetalk sounded good over a 28.8k modem, and in 1999 that described my situation almost exactly. I was dialing in from Turkey somewhere between 33.6k and 56k, so for once the hardware the product was written against and the hardware under my desk were the same object. The arithmetic still did not reach me, because the saving Firetalk was selling was an American saving.

In the United States the call to the ISP was local and free, and the money was in long distance, so pushing voice onto the internet turned an expensive call into a free one. On a Turkish line the local call to the ISP was itself metered. An hour of talking cost an hour of line time whether the voice went through the telephone network or through the modem, and Firetalk removed a charge I had never been paying. Add the full-duplex sound card it needed, which was a real purchase in Ankara in 1999, and the free product had a price on it after all.

It came from a game. Multitude, in South San Francisco, shipped a squad shooter called FireTeam on 14 December 1998 with a headset in the box, because the point of the game was talking to your team in real time while playing. The game sold about fifteen hundred copies by March 1999 and died. The reviews were kind about exactly one thing, which was the voice, so the company pulled the voice out of the corpse and made it the product.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The Christian Science Monitor looked at it in January 2000 and could not have been more enthusiastic. The download was under a megabyte. It ran on Windows and wanted Internet Explorer behind it, and it could hold one caller while you took another, which was the sort of feature people still associated with an office phone system.

The idea that got attention was the guided tour. You could take control of other people's browsers and walk up to eighty of them around a set of websites while everybody talked over the top of it. The company also claimed to have enabled voice chat on more than 63 million web pages, which meant a room attached to a URL that anyone reading it could drop into. That is roughly what a Discord server pinned to a community does now, minus the modem.

~ the money problem ~

Firetalk claimed two million users. A few thousand of them were paying subscribers. That gap is not a marketing failure, it is the shape of the entire free-voice business at the turn of the century, and every company in that business hit the same wall at the same time. Free calls attract people who want free calls, and the ones who would have paid for a phone call were the ones the product was designed to stop charging.

It folded in 2001. HearMe, its closest rival, folded the same year. The bandwidth had to be bought from somebody and there was nobody on the other side of the ledger, and this was the moment when the money for that sort of thing left the industry entirely.

~ what it became ~

Jason Katz, who ran Paltalk, bought the subscriber list and the source code cheaply once Firetalk went down. The pending patents came in the same deal. Forbes wrote it up in 2003 as the reason Paltalk survived a market that had killed both of its rivals, which is a strange kind of afterlife: the product dies, and the users and the code go on working somewhere with a different name over the door.

The domain went the same way. firetalk.com was picked up by Paltalk and pointed at paltalk.com, and it still refuses to load anything of its own today. Nothing about Firetalk is left standing except the pattern it demonstrated, which is that giving away voice is easy and being paid for it is not, and that lesson had to be learned again by Skype and by everybody after Skype.

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