History
Virtual Places Chat software was developed by an Israeli company, Ubique, in the mid 1990s. Early customers for VPchat included AOL and Excite. The chat software was very popular with both services, though eventually AOL abandoned it in favor of other chat programs. A likely factor in this decision was the problem of controlling the content of avatars, which can be a problem for a family oriented service. The service remained highly popular at Excite and drew at its peak tens of thousands of concurrent chatters.
When Excite (later merged with @Home to become Excite@Home) crashed at the end of the dot com boom, a group of former Excite employees acquired the rights to use the software and launched vpchat.com. They envisioned a service they built upon the strengths of VP chat – the virtual places web page paradigm, avatars, tours, and games – while addressing the community management problems associated with chat services that were compounded by the unrestricted graphics used in avatars. Their solution also addressed another problem with chat services – how to make it into a profitable business.
Other smaller groups of regular chatters elected instead to code a replacement for The VP Server and run alternative free servers. These became popular in short bursts.
In 1995 AOL acquired Ubique, which was described by AOL as a client-server software architecture allowing people to virtually meet and interact.
In 1998 IBM acquired Ubique from AOL and from Ubique's founders; Virtual Places presence and instant messaging components became part of Sametime technology, an IBM solution for corporate communication and collaboration.
Read more about this topic: Virtual Places Chat
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