WebChat Broadcasting System - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

WebChat Broadcasting System (or WBS

WBS

WBS may refer to:* WebChat Broadcasting System, a virtual community* Warwick Business School, the largest academic department of the University of Warwick* Ward-Beck Systems, Canadian manufacturer of Audio and Video equipment...

for short) was a virtual community

Virtual community

A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...

that existed during the 1990s. Supported by online advertising, it was one of few services like it at the time to offer free integrated community services including chat, homesteading, messaging, and user profiles. It was one of the most popular websites in the era before the Dot-com bust

Dot-com bubble

The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...

. WBS was at one time the largest interactive and event network on the Internet. In 1998 it was acquired by the search engine Infoseek

Infoseek

Infoseek was a popular search engine founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch.Infoseek was originally operated by the Infoseek Corporation, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Infoseek was bought by The Walt Disney Company in 1998, and the technology was merged with that of the Disney-acquired Starwave...

, which was in turn acquired by Disney/ABC

Disney-ABC Television Group

Disney-ABC Television Group manages all of The Walt Disney Company's worldwide entertainment and news television properties...

. The original WebChat Broadcasting System ceased to exist after its chatrooms were integrated into Disney's existing Go Network

Go.com

Go.com is a web portal first launched by Jeff Gold, and now operated by the Walt Disney Internet Group, which is a part of The Walt Disney Company. The portal includes content from ABC News, ESPN, and FamilyFun.com, all of which are associated with Disney and are hosted under a .go.com name...

chatrooms.

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. It allowed users to upload their own images into chat sessions and had three chat modes: streaming, frames, and no frames. 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 websites. Membership was free.

Founding

WBS was founded, originally as the Internet Roundtable Society, in 1990 by Michael J. Fremont and Wendie Bernstein Lash in Menlo Park

Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. It began as an "edutainment

Edutainment

Edutainment is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse.-Overview:...

" company featuring such content as live Internet broadcasts of interviews with prominent individuals in science, technology, and pop culture, but began focusing on chat in 1993, whereupon the name was changed to WBS.

Growth

IRC

Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

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.

In August 1996 WBS had 500,000 users and was growing by 3,000 users a 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.

In May 1997 WBS had 1.4 million registered users. The other large web chat company as this time was WebGenesis Inc.'s The Globe

TheGlobe.com

theGlobe.com was an internet startup founded in 1994 by Cornell students Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. A social networking service, theGlobe.com made headlines by going public on November 13, 1998 and posting the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date...

. Also internet service provider AOL had over 14,000 chat rooms available to their customers through their non-web interface.
In June 1997 WBS hit 1.5 million registered users and had 7 million daily page views with over 200 rooms.

WBS frequently hosted real-time multimedia programming events, which only increased as its popularity grew. Such events attracted celebrities such as Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy

Thomas Leo "Tom" Clancy, Jr. is an American author, best known for his technically detailed espionage, military science, and techno thriller storylines set during and in the aftermath of the Cold War, along with video games on which he did not work, but which bear his name for licensing and...

, the celebrity cast of Star Trek

Star Trek

Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...

, bands Soundgarden

Soundgarden

Soundgarden is an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington in 1984 by singer Chris Cornell, lead guitarist Kim Thayil, and bassist Hiro Yamamoto...

and Metallica

Metallica

Metallica is an American heavy metal band from Los Angeles, California. Formed in 1981 when James Hetfield responded to an advertisement that drummer Lars Ulrich had posted in a local newspaper. The current line-up features long-time lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo ...

, the former president of PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

, Lawrence Grossman from NBC News

NBC

The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

Senator Arlen Specter

Arlen Specter

Arlen Specter is a former United States Senator from Pennsylvania. Specter is a Democrat, but was a Republican from 1965 until switching to the Democratic Party in 2009...

, Intel CEO Andy Grove and feminist Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s...

Rise of instant messaging

Web-based chatting in general became less popular as instant messaging

Instant messaging

Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

systems were developed. ICQ

ICQ

ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, which was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis, then bought by America Online, and since April 2010 owned by Mail.ru Group. The name ICQ is a homophone for the phrase "I seek you"...

was first released in November 1996. AOL Instant Messenger

AOL Instant Messenger

AOL Instant Messenger is an instant messaging and presence computer program which uses the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time. It was released by AOL in May 1997...

was released in May 1997. Yahoo! Pager (later renamed Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger is an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!...

) launched on March 9, 1998. AOL acquired ICQ's parent company Mirabilis on June 8, 1998.

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.

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

When Infoseek acquired WBS there had been several web portals that added chat as a service. Lycos

Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

had bought the Tripod

Tripod.com

Tripod.com is a web hosting service owned by Lycos. Originally aiming its services to college students and young adults, it was one of several sites trying to build online communities during the dot-com bubble...

community in February 1998 and Yahoo had added a deal with GeoCities

GeoCities

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan.GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet . In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages...

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

Excite

Excite is a collection of Internet sites and services owned by IAC Search & Media, which is a subsidiary of InterActive Corporation . Launched in 1994, it is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal, a search engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock...

.

In September 1999, Infoseek was bought out by the Go Network. WBS was eventually shut down, and the site switched to a Java-based chat system. All that was left for the members at that time was a simple message saying, "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." Six months later, all home pages were completely erased.

Tributes

Many displaced members who had previously frequented the roleplaying game rooms on WBS began finding homes in new services that were springing up.

Some patrons of the general topic rooms migrated to sites such as WBSoutcasts. A LiveJournal

LiveJournal

LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community....

community was created in the wake of its namesake's disappearance. It is suspected that many patrons moved to 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

Entertainment

Entertainment consists of any activity which provides a diversion or permits people to amuse themselves in their leisure time. Entertainment is generally passive, such as watching opera or a movie. Active forms of amusement, such as sports, are more often considered to be recreation...

, computers and the internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

, travel

Travel

Travel is the movement of people or objects between relatively distant geographical locations. 'Travel' can also include relatively short stays between successive movements.-Etymology:...

, video games, roleplaying games, and the arts

ARts

aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....

. The site would eventually host around 260 different chat rooms.

General hub

Have a Friend
Hallway
Hot Tub
Current Events/Politics
WebTV
The Pool
Flirt room
Bar and Grill

Age specific hub

Preteen
Teen 13-15
Teen 16-19
Teen Terrace
Twentysomething
Thirtysomething
Fortysomething
Fifty Plus

International and ethnic hub

Habla Espanol?
African-American
British
Mexican
Native American
Netherlander
Filipino
Italian
Europe
American room
Quebec

Support and lifestyles hub

Atheist
Big People
Christian (also age specific: Christian 20something, Christian 30something...)
College Chat
Comics 'n Stuff
Cowboy Talk
Girl Chat
Gothic Cathedral
Guy Chat
Psych Central
Sex Talk
Book Talk
Edgewise Cafe (a poetry chatroom)
Pagan - Wicca Chat
Spirituality
Alternative Music

Roleplaying and special interest hub

Anime
alt.tv.simpsons (The Simpsons)
Glenshadow's Tavern
Dragon Mount
Nia's Tavern
Inn of the Weary Traveler
Battledome
World of Darkness
Sailor (Moon) Soldiers
Star Trek AKA The Nexus Bar
NinRPG AKA The Truce Inn
The Star Wars Cantina
Roland's Cavern
Highlander
Port Royal
Classical Music
Big Bands
Beatlemania
Alt. Music
Industrial Music
Punkers Palace
Trivia
The Realm of Elahrair
The Dark Citadel
DOOM Freaks
Dragonhold
Dragondale City (DDC)
Silvermoon Forest
Valley of the Lunar Rainbow
Vampire Chat (later renamed World of Darkness Chat)
X-Philers
Nails Ginjoint
NetLinkORama
Nintendo Fans
WolfSamurai Castle
X Mansion
World of Darkness Chat
World Scouting
WWF Wrestling Chat

Executives

President and CEO Bayard Winthrop was a frequent spokesperson for the company. After its buyout, he subsequently went on to become CEO of Freeboard, a San Francisco-based sporting goods manufacturer.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.