WebChat Broadcasting System

Last updated
WebChat Broadcasting System
WBS logo.gif
Logo used by WBS from c. October 1997 to its merger with Go.com on 15 September 1999. [1] [2]
Type of site
 Web chat, message board, hosting service
Available inEnglish
URL wbs.net (archived)
CommercialYes
RegistrationYes, required. [3]
Current statusOriginal site closed down; incorporated into Go.com. Site recreated in 2009 as classic-wbs.net

WebChat Broadcasting System, or WBS for short, is a virtual community created during the 1990s. Supported by online advertising, it was one of few services at the time to offer free integrated community services including chat rooms, message boards, and free personal web pages. Extremely popular during the mid to late 1990s in the era prior to the Dot-com bust, WBS was at that time the largest and best-known social media website on the internet. [3] In 1998, WBS was acquired by the search engine Infoseek, which was in turn acquired by Disney/ABC. The original WebChat Broadcasting System closed on 15 September 1999 after its chat rooms were integrated into Disney's existing Go Network chat rooms. [2] A revival of WBS was launched in 2009 and is virtually identical to the original community. [4]

Contents

Features

WBS featured browser-based chat, real-time discussion, with moderated chat rooms in addition to user-created private chat rooms. Common to webchat, its chat rooms required no software download to use. [5] It allowed users to upload their own images into chat sessions and had three chat modes: streaming, frames, and no frames. [6] [7] In addition to images users could add audio, video, and hotlinks to conversations. WBS also featured other services, such as email, and allowed users to create and maintain personal web pages. Membership was free. [5]

History

Founding

WBS was founded as the Internet Roundtable Society in 1990 by Michael J. Fremont and Wendie Bernstein Lash in Menlo Park, California. [8] It began as an "edutainment" company featuring such content as live Internet broadcasts of interviews with prominent individuals in science, technology and pop culture. As internet chatting gained popularity, the company began to focus on chat, whereupon the name was changed to the WebChat Broadcasting System in 1993. [7]

Growth

IRC had existed as a dedicated chatting network but was mostly used by seasoned Internet users. Chat websites capitalized on the growing base of Internet general users by providing a simpler, more attractive chatting interface. Chatting became focused on community and socialization. [7]

By August 1996, WBS had 500,000 registered users and was growing by over 3,000 users per day.

In February 1997, WBS reached a milestone of 1 million registered users, accruing 4,000 new registered users and 5.5 million page views every day. Registrations were not confirmed. At this point, it was featuring 200 individual affinity groups. Within a week of the launch of a new feature to allow members to create their own home pages, over 15,000 members had begun using it. [9]

By May 1997, WBS had grown to 1.4 million registered users. The other large web chat community at this time was WebGenesis Inc.'s The Globe. Also internet service provider AOL had over 14,000 chat rooms available to their customers through their non-web interface. [10]

In June 1997, WBS hit 1.5 million registered users and had 7 million daily page views with over 200 rooms. [5]

WBS frequently hosted real-time multimedia programming events, which became more frequent as its popularity grew. Such events attracted many celebrities such as Tom Clancy, the celebrity cast of Star Trek, bands Soundgarden and Metallica, the former president of PBS and NBC News, Lawrence Grossman, United States Senator Arlen Specter, Intel CEO Andy Grove and feminist Gloria Steinem. [9] [11]

Rise of instant messaging

Web-based chatting in general began to lose popularity with the rise of several instant messaging desktop applications in the late 1990s. ICQ was first released in November 1996. AOL Instant Messenger was released in May 1997. Yahoo! Pager, later renamed Yahoo! Messenger, launched on 9 March 1998. AOL acquired ICQ's parent company Mirabilis on 8 June 1998. MSN Messenger from Microsoft, later renamed Windows Live Messenger, debuted on 22 July 1999.

Infoseek buyout and demise

Infoseek bought out WBS for approximately $6.7 million, or about 350,000 shares of Infoseek stock in April 1998. At the time WBS had 2.7 million users. [12]

WBS daily page views were down to 5 million in April, 1998. [13]

When Infoseek acquired WBS there had been several web portals that added chat as a service. Lycos had bought the Tripod community in February 1998 and Yahoo had added a deal with GeoCities in January 1998. There was strong competition between the web portals to match each other's services. WBS, at the time of the Infoseek acquisition, had 2.7 million registered users. This total was more than the membership of Tripod and GeoCities combined. WBS had only 350,000 personal homepages at the time. Infoseek's three main competitors at the time were Lycos, Yahoo, and Excite. [14]

In 1998, Infoseek was purchased by the Go Network. On September 15, 1999, WBS was shut down and many of the more popular rooms were transferred to Go's Java-based chat system. All that was left for the members at that time was this simple message: "Go.Com has decided to close down WBS and move its most popular rooms to the chat rooms at Go.Com. Your home pages will still be viewable for an undetermined amount of time. Thank you for supporting WBS during its existence." By the Spring of 2000, all WBS home pages had been deleted. Go.com abandoned chat entirely in 2001.

Migration

After its demise, many patrons of WBS migrated to other browser-based chat sites where some of the general topic rooms were recreated. Notable sites created in the wake of WBS' closure included bigbob.com and mywbs.com, both of which were created by former WBS chatters, utilizing a similar browser-based chat system. It is likely that many WBS chatters began using instant messaging software, the popularity of which was increasing substantially at that time.

Martin Foster developed software that offered several of the features of the original WBS and IFC that had gained popularity. This code has been used in developing numerous chat sites which have attracted many former patrons of the original WBS, especially those who frequented the roleplaying rooms. It was originally developed to power Ethereal Realms, but the site now merely hosts the software for use on other sites.

Audience

WBS offered a wide array of chat rooms categorized into hubs. Many rooms were dedicated to affinity groups based on age, race/ethnicity, religion, and sexuality. Others were specific to topics such as dating, entertainment, computers and the internet, travel, video games, roleplaying games, and the arts. The site would eventually host around 260 different chat rooms.

Executives

President and CEO Bayard Winthrop was a frequent spokesperson for the company. [15] After its buyout, he co-founded Freebord, a San Francisco-based sporting goods manufacturer, in January 2001. [16] [17] From 2008 to 2011, Winthrop was the CEO of Chrome Industries. [17] He left in March 2011 and proceeded to found American Giant. [18] [19]

2009 revival

In July 2009, classic-wbs.net, a revival of WBS and virtually identical to the original community, was launched; most of the original chat rooms and features had been retained or recreated. The most noticeable differences were the lack of personal homepages and the chat rooms were not moderated. The revived WBS community was closed during the summer of 2023 and has not reappeared. [4]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AOL</span> American internet portal

AOL is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AIM (software)</span> Instant messaging service

AIM was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.

ICQ New was a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) and VoIP client. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase "I Seek You". Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group in 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Instant messaging</span> Form of computer communication over the internet or locally

Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate (real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involving simple text message exchanges, modern IM applications and services tend to also feature the exchange of multimedia, emojis, file transfer, VoIP, and video chat capabilities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CompuServe</span> 1969–2009 American online service provider

CompuServe was an American online service, the first major commercial one in the world. It opened in 1969 as a timesharing and remote access service marketed to corporations. After a successful 1979 venture selling otherwise under-utilized after-hours time to Radio Shack customers, the system was opened to the public, roughly the same time as The Source.

Trillian is a proprietary multiprotocol instant messaging application created by Cerulean Studios. It is currently available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, and the Web. It can connect to multiple IM services, such as AIM, Bonjour, Facebook Messenger, Google Talk (Hangouts), IRC, XMPP (Jabber), VZ, and Yahoo! Messenger networks; as well as social networking sites, such as Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Twitter; and email services, such as POP3 and IMAP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Online chat</span> Real-time texting over the internet

Online chat is any kind of communication over the Internet that offers a real-time transmission of text messages from sender to receiver. Chat messages are generally short in order to enable other participants to respond quickly. Thereby, a feeling similar to a spoken conversation is created, which distinguishes chatting from other text-based online communication forms such as Internet forums and email. Online chat may address point-to-point communications as well as multicast communications from one sender to many receivers and voice and video chat, or may be a feature of a web conferencing service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XMPP</span> Communications protocol for message-oriented middleware

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML, it enables the near-real-time exchange of structured data between two or more network entities. Designed to be extensible, the protocol offers a multitude of applications beyond traditional IM in the broader realm of message-oriented middleware, including signalling for VoIP, video, file transfer, gaming and other uses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo! Messenger</span> Instant messaging protocol

Yahoo! Messenger was an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!. Yahoo! Messenger was provided free of charge and could be downloaded and used with a generic "Yahoo ID" which also allowed access to other Yahoo! services, such as Yahoo! Mail. The service also offered VoIP, file transfers, webcam hosting, a text messaging service, and chat rooms in various categories.

GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.

eWorld Former Apple service

eWorld was an online service operated by Apple Inc. between June 1994 and March 1996. The services included email, news, software installs and a bulletin board system. Users of eWorld were often referred to as "ePeople."

Infoseek was an American internet search engine founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xfire</span> Instant messaging service and game server browser

Xfire was a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers that also served as a game server browser with various other features. It was available for Microsoft Windows. Xfire was originally developed by Ultimate Arena based in Menlo Park, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AOL Mail</span> Free web-based email service provided by AOL

AOL Mail is a free web-based email service provided by AOL, a division of Yahoo! Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meebo</span> Instant messaging client

Meebo was an instant messaging and social networking service provider. It was founded in September 2005 by Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, and Elaine Wherry, and was based in Mountain View, California. Initially the company offered a web-based instant messenger service, extending its offer in more general online chat and even social networking directions. In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Go.com</span> Landing page for Disney Internet content

Go.com is a portal for Disney content that was created after The Walt Disney Company acquired the search engine Infoseek. Go.com is operated by Disney Interactive's Disney Online. It began as a web portal launched by Jeff Gold. Go.com includes content from ABC News, which is owned by Walt Disney Television and is hosted under a .go.com name. Along with Time Warner's Pathfinder.com, Go.com proved to be an expensive failure for its parent company, as web users largely preferred to use search engines to access content directly, rather than using directories. In 2013, the site was transitioned from a general-interest portal to a simple landing page.

disney.com Official website of The Walt Disney Company

disney.com is a website operated by Disney Digital Network, a division of The Walt Disney Company, that promotes various Disney properties such as films, television shows, and theme park resorts, and offers entertainment content intended for children and families. disney.com is the company's second effort at a web portal, the first being ended with the loss of go.com.

Broadband Sports was originally founded in 1998, later becoming a high-flying dotcom-era network of sports-content Web sites that raised over $60 million before shutting down in February 2001.

AOL Hometown was a web hosting service offered by AOL. It offered 12 megabytes of server space for AOL subscribers to publish their own websites, and included a 10-step form-driven page creator called 1-2-3 Publish and a WYSIWYG online website builder called Easy Designer, neither of which required knowledge of HTML. In 2001, AOL Hometown estimatedly had 11 million websites and a new website was added to it every eight seconds. By 2002, AOL Hometown had grown to 14 million websites. It was shut down on 31 October 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MSN Dial-up</span> Internet service provide operated by Microsoft

MSN Dial-up is an Internet service provider operated by Microsoft in the United States and formerly also in several other countries. Originally named The Microsoft Network, it debuted as a proprietary online service on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of Windows 95. In 1996 and 1997, a revised web-based version of the ISP was an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet.

References

  1. ↑ See archived versions of the splash page from 1997.
  2. 1 2 "Untitled statement about WBS' closure". GO Network. Archived from the original on 30 November 1999.
  3. 1 2 French, Deanie (1999). Internet Based Learning: An Introduction and Framework for Higher Education. Stylus Publishing, LLC. p. 66. ISBN   9781579220075.
  4. 1 2 WebChat Broadcasting System (Beta) - WBS.NET. Retrieved on 25 September 2013.
  5. 1 2 3 Fernandes, Lorna (20 June 1997). "Techweek - WebChat serves 1.5 million". Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. Archived from the original on 23 May 2020. Retrieved 19 August 2009.
  6. ↑ McConnell, David (2000). Implementing Computer Supported Cooperative Learning (2nd ed.). London, England: Kogan Page. pp. 59–60. ISBN   9780749431358.
  7. 1 2 3 CNET News staff (7 January 1997). "Yahoo adds voice to chat". CNET News . Archived from the original on 25 October 2012. Retrieved 19 August 2009.
  8. ↑ "Corporate Backgrounder". WebChat Broadcasting System. 10 December 1997. Archived from the original on 10 December 1997. Retrieved 6 May 2009.
  9. 1 2 "WebChat Broadcasting System hits 1 million registered users" (Press release). Menlo Park, California: Business Wire, FindArticles. 3 February 1997. Archived from the original on 19 June 2006. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
  10. ↑ Hof, Robert D (May 5, 1997). "Breaking out of the yak pack". Business Week. McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. Archived from the original on 17 June 1997. Retrieved 19 August 2009.
  11. ↑ "Internet Users Flock to WebChat Broadcasting System; Site Now the Largest Chatting Hub on the World Wide Web" (Press release). Menlo Park, California: Business Wire, FindArticles. 20 November 1995. Archived from the original on 12 September 2009. Retrieved 23 May 2020.
  12. ↑ "Infoseek to Buy WebChat Broadcasting". Los Angeles Times . Reuters. 15 April 1998. Archived from the original on 23 May 2020. Retrieved 23 May 2020.
  13. ↑ "Infoseek Pares Its Losses". Wired . 23 April 1998. Archived from the original on 12 September 2009. Retrieved 23 May 2020.
  14. ↑ Nickell, Joe (17 April 1998). "Web Portals Play Leapfrog". Wired. Archived from the original on 12 September 2009. Retrieved 19 August 2009.
  15. ↑ Hof, Robert D; Browder, Seanna; Elstrom, Peter (5 May 1997). "Internet Communities – Forget surfers. A new class of Netizen is settling right in". BusinessWeek . Archived from the original on 17 June 1997.
  16. ↑ "BSV 09 Judging Panel". Freebord. 17 November 2009. Archived from the original on 23 May 2020.
  17. 1 2 "Bayard Winthrop". LinkedIn . Archived from the original on 23 May 2020.
  18. ↑ CNBC.com staff (10 March 2015). "Bayard Winthrop". CNBC . Archived from the original on 23 May 2020.
  19. ↑ Wang, Jennifer (26 June 2013). "The Man Behind the Hoodie That Started the Made-In-the-USA Apparel Movement". Entrepreneur . Archived from the original on 8 February 2015.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.