Thepalace.com
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ThePalace.com is a website that caters mostly to teenagers, especially girls, for chats with an elaborate avatar system. ThePalace chat software was created by Jim Bumgardner and later co-developed with Mark Jeffrey in 1994. Originally picked up by Time Warner Interactive as a chat game tool, it was then sold to Intel, at which point it became a stand alone company called The Palace Inc. In the first 2 years members had to pay $40 for a license key but this business model failed. Electric communities bought The Palace Inc. and tried to develope new software but failed to make the chat secure. They changed their name to communities.com but in 2000 they decided to abandon The Palace software and make a new more secure chat. In januari of 2001 communities.com went bankrupt.
The specialty of The Palace chat is that members can create their own worlds and avatars (images to represent themselves). They can start a Palace server from their home computer and build a chat with sounds, animations and games. The biggest Palace legacy on internet is in fact the Dollz created almost 10 years ago as Palace avatars. Because the Palace has a flexible avatar system someone figured it was fun to make a simple body you could dress up. Once the member has created an avatar to represent herself or himself, the member can pick up various pieces of clothing or other items, such as hats, handbags, cans of soda, candy bars, bicycles, or hand tools.
The "palace community" is an international community, and you can select palaces that speak mainly German, Spanish, or French, just to name a few languages. Because of the cartoon like chatting with little speech balloons The Palace is still pretty popular with young internet users. A group of community leaders have managed to keep all the Palace info alive and online.
ThePalace.com was bought by a Palace enthousiast in 2003 and is now just a website that links directly to the sites that kept the community afloat. Currently the main Palace website is called Palaceplanet, it has a active user forum, weblinks downloads and the live directory. Build as a community portal long before the software was abandoned volunteers helped to keep the site alive and up to date.
Sample room in a palace
You can play chess with someone by inviting them to the chess table
See also: List of websites
External links
- Link to ThePalace.com (http://www.thepalace.com/).
- Link to PalacePlanet (http://www.palaceplanet.net/).
- Comparative review (http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens/findbuds.htm) of sites like ThePalace.com that encourage teenagers to learn foreign languages.
- Interview with the creator of The Palace software (http://www.thepalace.com/assets/jbum/)
- alexa.com traffic rating (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&url=Thepalace.com#top)