Friday, October 3rd 2008 — UPDATE: Unfortunately, the founder of WBS-XF, Jeremy Davis (aka. Sartavius), stole the identity of his elderly neighbor and used her credit card to pay for our work. This fraud has been reported to federal, Indiana state and Indianapolis city authorities.

We are honored to have been selected by a WBS revival group, WBS-XF, to develop a streaming chat component for their WBS restoration project.

The Webchat Broadcasting System (aka. WBS) was a cutting edge multimedia chat in the 1990's supporting images, html markup and accessible via several different chat modes. It was bought out by the Go Network, a Disney affiliate, and on September 15th 1999 was dismantled in lieu of one-line-wonder Java chat rooms touted as an "improved chat system" but which quickly died out as did the Go Network soon after the DotCom bubble burst. Several smaller startups including our own Endless Rant project stepped up but none could restore the function and popularity of WBS. The WBS.net domain was snagged by a former member but, failing to develop a viable chat system, is now being squatted on with a ridiculous asking price.

WBS used HTTP push technology to stream it's chat rooms which is immensely server intensive and only supported by the popular Netscape browser at the time. Since then technology has advanced and the streaming component we've developed for WBS-XF now uses XMLHttpRequest and JSON AJAX technologies facilitated, in part, by the jQuery framework supported by all popular browsers.

The WBS-XF group is committed to recreating the look and feel of WBS in hopes of sparking it's former glory.

Clients & Projects

• WBS Classic WBS Classic is an homage to and revival of the cutting edge and immensely popular WebChat Broadcasting System (WBS.NET) chat community site of the mid-1990s by WebChat Communications Inc.