Tribal Voice PowWow

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

~ the obituary ~

i missed powwow. by the time i was online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in turkey, the chat layer i was looking at was already locking onto icq and msn. powwow was the older us-coded thing that an american pc owner would have tried in 1996 or 1997 before icq took the global market away from everyone. it never reached me, and based on what i can read, it never reached most of europe either.

john mcafee founded tribal voice in december 1994 in woodland park, colorado, after stepping out of mcafee associates. powwow was the company's product, a small windows chat client with a voice feature on top of text, a shared whiteboard, a built-in speech synthesizer that would read your messages out loud, and drag-and-drop file transfer. tribes were the social structure, named rooms a user could create and run. by 1999 the network had about 2 million users distributed across roughly 40,000 of those tribes.

cmgi bought tribal voice in 1999 at the height of the dot-com run. it became part of cmgion in 2000. the last powwow release was version 4.2.2 in october of that year. on 19 january 2001 cmgi closed the unit, citing inability to attract new users, which was a polite way of saying the company itself was bleeding from the dot-com collapse and consolidating everything it owned.

~ the case file ~

~ what it tried ~

powwow was one of the first im clients to push cross-network interop. it could talk to aim and to msn messenger. for a brief window in 1999 and 2000 you could sit in a powwow window and reach friends on aol's network without paying aol anything. this was supposed to be the future, a federated layer over the walled networks. it was not the future.

the whiteboard and voice features were ahead of where the mainstream im products were in '99. but aol owned the userbase. icq had the global mindshare on the european side. powwow had the tech and not enough people.

~ the aol fight ~

in the late nineties aol sued tribal voice over the phrase "buddy list", and ran technical countermeasures to block third parties from talking to aim. tribal voice was one of several companies caught in that pattern (microsoft was another, on the msn messenger side, in the famous 1999 protocol war). aol kept changing the aim handshake. interop clients kept patching. aol changed it again. by the time the dot-com economy fell apart, none of the challengers had a real foothold. the buddy list belonged to aol on the legal layer and the social layer both.

~ the long tail ~

nothing here got passed forward in any clean way. cmgi shut down most of its portfolio in 2001. powwow's user base scattered to icq, msn, aim. the tribes idea, named persistent group rooms a user could own, eventually showed up again in irc-style products and then in discord, but not as a thing anyone traced back to powwow. john mcafee went on to other ventures. the colorado office was already gone by the time anyone outside the userbase noticed the service had ended.

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