TokBox

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

~ the eulogy ~

for me, video chat was the msn messenger webcam. by the mid-2000s i had ttnet broadband at home in turkey and a small camera, and that was the whole ritual, a green icon and a grainy window of whoever you were talking to. tokbox was a browser version of the same idea coming out of san francisco, and it never had a reason to reach me. i read about it later, the way you learn a road existed after the town it led to is gone.

the appeal was the missing step. tokbox, founded in 2007 by serge faguet and ron hose, let you start a video call from a link, no install and no signup, back when that was genuinely unusual. you could pull several people into one window and it just worked inside the page. for a couple of years it was one of the friendlier ways to put a face on a conversation online without asking the other person to set anything up.

friendliness did not pay. the company decided the real business was selling the plumbing to other sites, and it rebuilt the technology as opentok, a developer api. on 5 april 2011 it shut the free consumer chat and kept only the paid platform. telefonica bought the company in 2012 and vonage bought it later still, so the code lived on for years inside products that never carried the tokbox name.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

the trouble with being a free, easy thing is that being free and easy is not a business. tokbox had built exactly the feature people wanted and no clear way to charge them for it. selling the capability to companies instead of to people was the sensible move on a spreadsheet, and it also meant walking away from the audience that had made the product worth talking about.

~ what it became ~

opentok quietly won in a form nobody noticed. when webrtc arrived and browser video calling became a standard part of the web, tokbox's api sat under a long list of apps that needed a call button and did not want to build one. the consumer product died in 2011, but its actual descendant is the video widget embedded in half the services you use, credited to no one.

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