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Comment by wooster | Hacker News Reader

I remember the PowWow McAfee founded that did collaborative web browsing.…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)

That was my thought, is this a renewal of a 90s brand? The original PowWow was something that our QA people used for reasons I can't recall.

Probably because it had the PowWow Robot Voice to read your chats for you. Not that it was super useful, it just sounded funny.

I think this was also one of the first applications that could qualify as an instant messaging tool. I remember it coming out well before ICQ and AIM.

I hope the guys working on this project don't end up mired in trademark issues.

> I think this was also one of the first applications that could qualify as an instant messaging tool

I would certainly consider IRC to be an instant messagig tool, and that has been around since around 1988, while the orginal PowWow seems to be from 1994, which would make it 6 years late to be first. The most well known networks like ICQ and MSN came some years later, so they were still early.

I suppose you could consider IRC and IM to have some significant feature overlap, but I'd still regard them as essentially different things. IRC's core feature is larger-scale many-to-many conversations, and IM's core feature is one-to-one conversation, and this in turn leads to significant differences usage patterns, interface conventions, network protocols etc. that even further differentiate them.

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