Tinychat

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

~ the obituary ~

tinychat was the kind of thing late-2000s us college rooms left running in a browser tab on the second monitor. i was not in that room. by 2009 i was an engineering grad on msn and skype, the part of the internet that opened a webcam was the part i mostly avoided.

the product launched in february 2009 as a way to spin up a group video chatroom from a browser url. martin redmond and michael stern had built a predecessor called talkabee, daniel saltman reached out, and the three of them merged the projects under the tinychat name. by may they had layered live audio and video on top. you picked a room name. you shared the link. up to twelve webcams could come in. back then. anyone else who wanted to was a spectator.

in january 2011 the project raised a small seed round, around 1.5 million dollars, from ashton kutcher and sean combs among others. it sat in the chatroulette wake, more topic-based and less random than the roulette product. the moment passed. by the early 2010s the english tech press had largely moved on to mobile video apps. tinychat kept going on residual users.

~ the case file ~

~ the paltalk years ~

paltalk acquired tinychat on december 16, 2014 for an undisclosed sum. techcrunch framed the deal as a consolidation play in video messaging, with snapchat and facetime eating the attention that older chatroom products used to hold. paltalk was a 1998-era voice and video service that had quietly survived its own decade. honestly, the plan was to run both as separate brands.

the brand survived. peerstream, paltalk's parent, kept the tinychat name alive for ten more years. through this whole stretch the product was a smaller and smaller share of what the parent company did, public filings show paltalk's revenue had moved toward its own brand and toward crypto and ai side bets by the early 2020s. tinychat sat there as a back-catalog property with diminishing engineering attention.

~ how it ended ~

on december 16, 2024, ten years to the day after the acquisition, the tinychat homepage stopped working as a service. in its place a notice said the platform had closed. it carried an ad pointing visitors at paltalk.com. no farewell post, no thank-you note to the people who had spent fifteen years there.

the domain was bought a few months later by the operator of strangercam, a random video chat product, who relaunched a tinychat-branded roulette site on may 2, 2025. that is not tinychat in any continuous sense. it is the same six letters pointing at a different product. the actual thing, the browser room you could share a link to and pile twelve webcams into, ended on the 16th.

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