VP: Various Communities

VP Communities on the Web

As of September 12, 1997, AOL has announced that they are shutting down the original VP 1.0 community and the secondary 2.0 commmunity in order to "bring people into" their new 2.1 server community. Although the software still exists, there will be no server for anyone to log into except the 2.1 servers starting mid-September.

This is a great loss of a year-and-a-half old community of more than a thousand people who trusted AOL.

Excite Chat (VP 2.1) . . . one of the latest VP communities that is not on an AOL server. Excite is still growing, but is a very large community (approx. 3000 evenings) with scheduled chats and monitors. Free speech is encouraged; a PG13 atmosphere is usually what one finds, though some areas are distinctly adult in nature (usually labelled as such). Name registration is required to join the community in the full chat client; there is also a java client available for "instant chat." Registration is free. So far Excite has promised to keep VP free for its users indefinitely.

Requires MSIE on your machine even if you designate Netscape as your default browser.

AOL VP 2.1 . . . We don’t know their business plan for this community, but it appears to be based on a more commercial scheme than Excite’s, with corporate sponsors. There has been no announcement of charging for this service, however AOL has, in their small print of terms of service, retained the right to charge for using VP 2.1 in the future on their servers. Right now (September 1) the community is tiny (less than 100 people), but once AOL announces this community server open, both inside AOL and to the Net community at large, it’s sure to grow even larger than Excite’s. This may not be a good thing in the long run. More AOL chat room ambience, but with the added feature of pictures. I dunno. Let’s wait and see which dog comes out on top. Registration is required for this community, as with Excite.

Requires MSIE on your machine even if you designate Netscape as your default browser.

ZDNet VP 2.1 . . . is the Ziff-David home for a very small and highly structured VP community dedicated to computer-related issues. They do run regular events and classes with the Ziff-Davis University backing ... if it grows to more than 50 users, it might be a good thing. You are required to register under your "real first and last name" in this community, and it is highly enforced by their online monitors, as is all language and behavior.

Requires MSIE on your machine even if you designate Netscape as your default browser.