Virtual Places

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

~ the last words ~

by the time virtual places had a moment in the US, i was already on ICQ over a 33.6k modem in ankara. avatar chat overlays that painted little smiling heads on top of browser windows were not a stack that reached the turkish web at meaningful scale. AOL itself did not really reach turkey. we had TTNet dial-up going straight to whatever web the browser could load, not to a walled-garden portal with a chat overlay baked in.

of my life. ubique was founded in rehovot in 1994 by ehud shapiro and avner shafrir. shapiro was a computer scientist at the weizmann institute, avner shafrir was the operations partner. the pitch of virtual places was one of those late-90s ideas that felt obvious at the time. every web page has visitors on it at any given moment. those visitors cannot see each other. what if the browser knew who else was on the same URL and let them chat and hover around a shared cursor while they were there?

i was not around for the AOL era of this product, but by the specs it was a heavy client. the virtual places software drew avatar heads over the top of the browser window and rendered a buddy list plus a chat pane in a docked side panel. it tracked what URL each user's browser had loaded and put them into a per-URL room automatically. no logins per room, no need to pick a channel, the URL was the channel.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

AOL acquired ubique in mid-1995, when AOL was still growing its walled-garden chat business fast and looking for anything that added a differentiated chat mechanic. virtual places shipped inside the AOL client for years afterward as one of several chat surfaces. it never became the primary AOL chat product because AOL's flagship chat was the room-based text chat that ran in the millions-of-concurrent-users range. virtual places was the fancy variant.

excite licensed virtual places in the late '90s and it took off there in a way it never had inside AOL. excite ran the client as free download and it drew tens of thousands of concurrent chatters at peak. that was still an order of magnitude below the AOL chat numbers but for a portal-adjacent chat service on the open web it was significant. the co-browsing mechanic worked well as a way to hang out with strangers on news pages or on excite's own content areas.

~ how it survived a while ~

in fairness ubique itself did not get killed by any of the consumer product problems. IBM's lotus division bought the company in 1998 for the underlying presence protocol. what lotus wanted was the technical stack that made virtual places work at all. the client-server protocol for tracking who was where in real time, plus the state-sync layer that kept every viewer's take on a room consistent. that protocol got folded into what lotus announced in 2000 as sametime, the enterprise-messaging product that ran inside notes shops for the next couple of decades.

the consumer virtual places lineage was messier. by 2001 AOL had quietly retired the client from its consumer stack in favor of the room-based chat and AIM. excite crashed into excite@home bankruptcy at the end of the same year, taking the second-largest deployment of the virtual places software with it. a small group of former excite chat regulars acquired the vpchat.com domain and ran a scaled-down version of the service for years afterward with the surviving user base.

~ what got buried with it ~

roughly. the interesting thing about virtual places is what it tried to solve. the "who else is on this URL right now" question is one that the modern web still does not have a good answer for. modern browsers have no built-in presence layer. google docs and figma both have one, plus a handful of other collaborative products that bolt it onto their specific document types. nothing works across arbitrary web pages the way virtual places did in the late '90s.

the sametime lineage is still alive in the form of hcl sametime, which is what the ubique protocol became after IBM sold the lotus portfolio to HCL in 2018. that is the surviving descendant of the code that started as a chat overlay for the AOL client. the vpchat.com small-community continuation ran into the late 2000s before going quiet. as a piece of the late-90s consumer web, virtual places went into the ground with excite@home. as a piece of enterprise messaging infrastructure, its technical DNA is still running inside notes deployments that have somehow outlived their own century.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »