Web chat

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Web Chats are chatrooms based on the web, accessible through a web browser. They are generally accepted as some of the first forms of real-time chat, being introduced around TEH OLDE days of the 1990s. This was before the dotcom bubble had helped make the internet mainstream, and as a result is also accepted as a RELIK OF THA PAST

(i'll figure out the wording here some time soon...)

The Evolution of Web Chats in the West

What was one of the most popular, and first site that came to provide chat services would be Web Chat Broadcasting System (formerly Internet Roundtable Society), first founded in 1990, and subsequentially becoming generally mainstream in 1993. (note to self, irsociety.com migrated to wbs.com. they seem to be the earliest webchat site?)

In 1994, w3 had released the first open source (not 100% sure, will do more research. also need to see if the japs got to them before the west. it's definitely not but still. wbs is closed source right..?) web chat system, known as WWW Interactive Talk. It was developed by Ari Luotonen in 3 days, and subsequently released as a Bourne shell script for the public to use. The source code seems to be lost, as the original source code had disappeared in 1997. (im actually not even sure if WWW interactive talk is really like a web chat. seemed more like a really old BBS if anything but theres like the one screenshot on the news page waha sent...)

Whereas during this time, IRC and other real-time chat solutions had existed by this time, it was still very difficult for general everyday users to understand in comparison to how easy Web Chat such as WBS and other independent sites had made the process much more streamlined. As a result, WBS had quickly amassed 2.2 million registered users by 1997, drawing lots of attention and leading the company into fame.

WBS was not the only website providing these services however, with competitors such as Tripod, and Geocities (i feel like mentioning tripod is important since it seemed to have CGI support, letting people make their own webchat. only that i cant find any tripod websites with any of those... that arent japanese... and even then i cant find any)

Mid-Late 90s, and WBS

Later, in 1998, WBS would be sold to Infoseek, a web search engine popular at the time. At the same time, many other companies had bought up other sites, namely Lycos (who now also owns Angelfire) purchasing Tripod for $58M USD. This, alongside other competitors such as Yahoo, and their respective chat led to a tense battle between companies to try rake in the highest user base. During all this, The dotcom bubble gradually became larger and larger as time progressed, with the previously mentioned Lycos's stock prices hitting from $6 to $78 and Infoseek going up to $10 to $44, ballooning their valuations and helping them dominate the web.

Soon after, Disney purchased a major stake into Infoseek, and only about a year later did Disney subsequntially buy the remainder of the company in July 1999. The same month, WBS went down permanently, and was absorbed into a subsidiary of Disney, Go.com.

Go.com

(note: wbs is not the only site i want to talk about. theGlobe.com and omnichat for similar 90s webchats, Rounds, maybe the short lived Google LivelyChat.. perhaps Zobe and TeenChat for more 2000s? hard to find anything about them though) (go.com also doesnt seem to have any webchat stuff in it lol. i will reformat this better in a while)

The Evolution of Web Chats in the East

A notable script used throughout the early years of the Japanese section of Webchat was Yui Chat, (JP: ゆいちゃっと) an open source CGI/Perl chatting software, made by an independent developer known as Yui throughout 1996-1997.

(i'll add a brief sentence or two about the other scripts, but this is a webchat article so i shouldnt go beyond that)

Yui Chat had a few variants to suit different sites needs, so alot of web chat sites ended up having alot of various rooms with varying features. Some included i-mode support (Yu I-mode..?), some had cut down functionality to lighten the load on the servers (Yuiscript Lite), some had a more secure backend (Yuiscript Pro 1.1, dubbed Yuiscript Secure), etc. Many old Japanese Yuiscript sites survive even today, with an example being Shino's Chat, a site up since March 1999. (according to the banner.)

(see if there are any other older or newer eastern CGI chat scripts other than COMCHAT.. and wonder if translator-sama is telling me the right things..)

Web Chat Today

Today, ancient HTML style web chatting has fallen out of the mainstream and forgotten, in favour of the progression of other, modern chatting software such as Discord, Skype (lol) and Slack. Primarily thanks to security concerns, alongside outdated interfaces, people progressively migrated to these solutions, and with more people came... more people. Most of these applications actually use web browsers as their interface, even when installed as applications, but what they succeed old HTTP style webchatting is in their featureset.

Webchat still finds a use today, primarily being used as simple and fast texting for customer support (when its uh.. not ChatGPT-san.. and actually works...), and there are still many small communities that still utilize old style webchatting even today, despite other options such as web based IRC clients existing.

Some of the more popular modern forms of Webchat are examples such as omegle, and the many thousands of spawn that came after it's death. (kinda like a wolf spider..) These sites primarily center around the same format, with a webcam feed, and either (or both) voice chat and simple text chat with a semi-randomly selected other user. Some of these sites will allow you to simply chat without either a voice or camera feed, and simply match you with another person to chat with (namely, omegle itself.)

However, oldfags of these more ancient than old sites end up spinning off their own revival servers. As an example, WBS has had a myriad of various revival projects, such as classic-wbs.net (dead since summer 2023) and wbs-retro (still going), each of which less successful than the last. Fans of these sites typically forgot about it, and moved on to wherever else.

Heyuri's Web Chat(s)

Heyuri as of writing has a single live web chat; being the Chat@Heyuri channel accessible at https://cgi.heyuri.net/chat/. The chatroom is based on COMCHAT, a CGI/Perl based web chat developed by KentWeb.

(i kinda wanna expand a bit. but i dunno what to talk abt)

Heyuri also has used COMCHAT to manage a now defunct chat for Hakoniwa Islands during peak times in the game's playercount. It is still up, in a read only state. (I'll put a link up sometime...)

Links

• Wikipedia page on WebChat Broadcasting System [1]
• KentWeb site archive [2] (original website still alive actually)
• Yui Chat site [3] & mirrors [4] [5] [6] (one of the mirrors is seemingly still up.. everything except the inbound & code links are dead)