(I)IRC
If I Recall Correctly...
The SciFi Channel (now SyFy) ran an Internet Relay Chat server at least as early as 1997. I don't remember exactly when it launched, but I do know it was operational in December 1999 -- because I was logged in on New Year's Eve, spiting Y2K (sure to cause traffic lights to go haywire, hospitals to short-circuit, and planes to literally fall from the skies). The rooms were full of... well, nerds, of course, but particularly weird nerds; the server was much lower-populated than the sprawling IRC giants that would arise like Darknet or Xellium or... well, anyway, the point is, there were a handful of chat rooms which each catered to a specific set of about a dozen or so people, and this was (as far as anyone there knew) what was meant by the term "online community."
I've been thinking of IRC lately because of the prevalence of the Slack chat platform, which does a good job of recreating a similar environment with a few more bells and whistles. Slack provides the line chat and client plugin support that IRC had, but streamlines the process and eliminates some of the weird quirks of IRC (like how clients connected as IP addresses, by default visible to everyone else on the server. Oh, the good old days of user-targeted DDOS).
A pretty significant difference, of course, is that IRC was hosted by anyone who cared to run a server, and Slack is hosted by... well, Slack. And analyzed by Slack, and marketed to by Slack's partners. The safe bet for the web-savvy commentor is that any platform has a longevity measured, like infants and toddlers, most accurately in months. But for those that break through to Internet immortality (over a decade, roughly), Big Data is a perennial golden orchard that yields juicy luchre-fruits for the plucking. Slack is positioned to potentially be to business marketers what Facebook is to... well, almost everyone right now; the source of the data river. By knowing what corporate teams want and what they dislike, Slack would be in an unrivaled brokerage position.
Even if they don't quite make it, they could probably sell out to Google for a Scrooge-like pool of money.
The thing is... the SciFi IRC server was a liability, financially speaking. It was run (from a distance) by a corporation to have a place to host certain events (like chats with various shows' castmembers) and to give its fans a sense of community. In a sense, it was the advertisement, rather than being a platform on which to advertise (or to gather data).
We've gone from building our homes underneath billboards to building homes to have places to put billboards above.
Well, so what?
Hmm...
The SciFi Channel (now SyFy) ran an Internet Relay Chat server at least as early as 1997. I don't remember exactly when it launched, but I do know it was operational in December 1999 -- because I was logged in on New Year's Eve, spiting Y2K (sure to cause traffic lights to go haywire, hospitals to short-circuit, and planes to literally fall from the skies). The rooms were full of... well, nerds, of course, but particularly weird nerds; the server was much lower-populated than the sprawling IRC giants that would arise like Darknet or Xellium or... well, anyway, the point is, there were a handful of chat rooms which each catered to a specific set of about a dozen or so people, and this was (as far as anyone there knew) what was meant by the term "online community."
I've been thinking of IRC lately because of the prevalence of the Slack chat platform, which does a good job of recreating a similar environment with a few more bells and whistles. Slack provides the line chat and client plugin support that IRC had, but streamlines the process and eliminates some of the weird quirks of IRC (like how clients connected as IP addresses, by default visible to everyone else on the server. Oh, the good old days of user-targeted DDOS).
A pretty significant difference, of course, is that IRC was hosted by anyone who cared to run a server, and Slack is hosted by... well, Slack. And analyzed by Slack, and marketed to by Slack's partners. The safe bet for the web-savvy commentor is that any platform has a longevity measured, like infants and toddlers, most accurately in months. But for those that break through to Internet immortality (over a decade, roughly), Big Data is a perennial golden orchard that yields juicy luchre-fruits for the plucking. Slack is positioned to potentially be to business marketers what Facebook is to... well, almost everyone right now; the source of the data river. By knowing what corporate teams want and what they dislike, Slack would be in an unrivaled brokerage position.
Even if they don't quite make it, they could probably sell out to Google for a Scrooge-like pool of money.
The thing is... the SciFi IRC server was a liability, financially speaking. It was run (from a distance) by a corporation to have a place to host certain events (like chats with various shows' castmembers) and to give its fans a sense of community. In a sense, it was the advertisement, rather than being a platform on which to advertise (or to gather data).
We've gone from building our homes underneath billboards to building homes to have places to put billboards above.
Well, so what?
Hmm...
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