WebChat Broadcasting System

» see wbs.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

wbs was at its largest in the summer of 1997, about a year before i first dialed in. the overlap is close enough to be irritating and the distance is still real. chat here ran through mirc on turkish irc networks and then through icq, on software you downloaded and configured yourself. a page you loaded in a browser to talk to americans was not a shape chat took in ankara.

the company was older than the thing it became known for. michael j. fremont and wendie bernstein lash started it in menlo park in 1990 as the internet roundtable society, an edutainment outfit doing live internet broadcasts of interviews with people from science and pop culture. chat kept growing inside what they had built, so in 1993 they renamed the company after it.

what wbs actually sold was that you needed nothing. no client to fetch, nothing to configure. you opened a page and you were in a room. two modes were on offer, one that streamed new lines at you and one built out of frames that reloaded on a timer, and the account came with a message board plus a free personal web page at no charge.

the numbers got large quickly. half a million registered users by august 1996. a million by february 1997, arriving at four thousand a day against five and a half million page views. by june 1997 it was 1.5 million users, seven million daily page views and over two hundred rooms. guests were booked into them the way a radio station books guests: tom clancy, the cast of star trek, metallica, andy grove, gloria steinem, a sitting us senator.

~ the record ~

~ what a room actually was ~

the room was the whole product. it had a name, a topic and a set of people who kept turning up in it, and the only identity you carried between rooms was the handle attached to your registration. that handle plus the free personal page underneath it is a profile, four or five years before anybody used the word. people put their page link in their messages and that was how you found out anything about the person you had been talking to for six weeks.

the broadcast half of the name never went away either. wbs ran scheduled events in rooms with a guest at the other end, moderated, questions queued up by staff. it was closer to a call-in show than to a chat network, and it is the piece of the design that portals kept copying while quietly dropping everything else.

~ the sale ~

infoseek bought wbs in april 1998 for roughly $6.7 million, paid as about 350,000 shares of infoseek stock. wbs had 2.7 million registered users at that point, which made it the largest community property on the web, and the price says plainly what a community property was worth in 1998 against a search engine's market cap. disney was already circling infoseek and took control of it that same year, then folded the whole thing into the go network.

what happens next is the ordinary shape of a portal acquisition. go.com had its own chat rooms. running two sets was not going to survive a single planning meeting. the popular wbs rooms were moved across, the rest were not, and the original site was switched off on 15 september 1999. seventeen months from acquisition to dark.

~ the second life ~

in july 2009 a revival opened at classic-wbs.net, built by people who had been in those rooms and wanted them back. it ran for fourteen years, longer than the original, on a fraction of the traffic. it closed during the summer of 2023 without a statement, which is how most second lives end.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »