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.[1]
They were first known well for their ability to provide real-time chat on an internet browser, allowing posting of images, video, audio clips, and etc, and found alot of success thanks to being one of the first to ever do it. Many people from different communities came together on WBS to just chat about stupid stuff, ranging from roleplayers to teens to "African_American_Gay (44)"[2], and thanks to that, WBS quickly gained rapid popularity throughout the 90s.
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,[1] 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 also providing users (with the knowhow) to make their own small webchat sites for small communities to foster in. This came alongside the other independent chat sites, such as Omnichat, a webchat that found small success in the same real-time chatting features. To this day, it's still up, and every now and again people still chat there. Mostly spam though.
(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, The Dotcom Bubble, 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.[3] 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[4], 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, and a new millenium
Go.com lacked much of the webchatting functionality, and more or less just became a second name for Disney's previous venture into the online space, Disney Online. Go.com did have a form of webchat,[5] however much of community fell away to other sites, where their friends followed. Despite this, Go.com did have some notable activity in their chatrooms, with some of their most active chatrooms (the flirting one, of course...) reaching in the triple digits for actively chatting members in archives, actually being to a similar quantity as WBS was in during 1998[2].
However, this would not last, as Go.com soon faced financial issues due to the platform itself not being the most profitable. As a result, in January 2001, Go.com was to be announced to be shut down[6], the chatrooms were to be closed and soon after that anything community wise fell away to other sites, including their user-contributed site directory and search engine. Soon after, Go.com had become a site simply being a shell for GoTo.com, then another search engine, and soon after just becoming a homepage for Disney content. Today the site remains as a Disney directory.
Chatting throughout The Mid-Late 2000s
(here i. intend to find webchats like WBS in the western world but i can't really find anything right now. i'll find some if i look more probably, maybe the short lived Google LivelyChat.. perhaps Zobe and TeenChat for more 2000s? hard to find anything about them though)
2010s, and almost modern day
This was the point where the majority of people using webchat had retreated to smaller communities, through more decentralized (as in community) alternatives, such as Skype and Facebook, where real time chatting had become enough of a commodity they ended up merged into parts of social media. However, many sites still floated around offering features that more traditional social media couldn't.
(im expanding this later too)
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 (dead in May 2025), Slack, etc. Primarily thanks to security concerns, alongside outdated interfaces, people progressively migrated to these solutions, and with more people came their friends, becoming a slow domino effect. 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 to medium sized communities that still utilize old style webchatting even today, despite other, more innovative options around the internet.
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. (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.) This format of 1 to 1 chatting became very popular, primarily due to it's younger audience performing... acts when requested and various other horny scenarios. It was filled with aLOT of horny 3D lovers.
However, resident users of these more ancient than old sites end up spinning off their own revival servers. Notably, 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 two live web chats; being the Chat@Heyuri channel accessible at https://cgi.heyuri.net/chat/, and DevChat@Heyuri. Both chatrooms are based on COMCHAT, a CGI/Perl based web chat developed by KentWeb.
As for Chat@Heyuri, It's generally quite active, and finds many frequent users of the site chatting the day away over general topics. DevChat@Heyuri is not as active, and is only used for the sites developers to speak over how to handle the site's development. You could also just ask some stuff about the backend if you wanted to. Nerd.
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.
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)
