Microsoft Dropping Chat Due To Liability

[Judson Singer]

In an interesting story this morning on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" ( <http://www.npr.org/archives/index.html> ), Microsoft has announced that it is dropping its free chat service in mid October because of the liability it faces due to the illegal actions of pedophiles and other nefarious characters who hang out in chat spaces. Other major chat services may well follow its lead for the same reasons or else add the additional expenses of heavily moderating these chat spaces. As well, it's not making money with its chat services. I wonder how this may impact Atmosphere, since chat ability and the creation of free chat environments by anybody lies at the core of its features. Could this danger put Adobe and EVERY ATMO world builder or host at equal risk?

How would you respond if you were sued by a distraught parent of a molested child who loved hanging out in one of the elegant and enchanting worlds you've built and/or hosted? What if your Halloween (or other thematic) world were inundated with spam chat touting external products or services? How could/would Adobe gracefully pull back if it removed ATMO chat? Would it emphasize other potential uses instead? Would it even be the SAME PRODUCT anymore? Would it drop ATMO altogether?????

[Judson Singer]

To hear the streaming audio of the feature story go to <http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1444281> .

[Michael Kaplan]

Folks,

All products evolve over time, and Atmosphere has been around for quite a while, originally as part of a much smaller company with a different marketing philosophy. As both the technology and the market have evolved, it should have become fairly obvious that the chat capabilities of Atmosphere are not nearly as central to the mission of Atmosphere as they were years ago in a different context. Adobe has not had chat-enabled environments of it's own for quite a while now (the famous HomeWorld question). I personally view chat and community as only one of many vertical markets and opportunities that a broad platform like Atmosphere can address, certainly not the central one. The Atmosphere Collaboration Server allows the developer to enable chat or the developer can simply disable chat by not pointing to the collaboration server when publishing an environment. Furthermore, the developer can use the collaboration server for synchronization and still disable chat through JavaScript control of the Plugin user interface. Please note, as well, that one can publish an environment as part of a web site and protect the environment with exactly the same mechanism as one would protect the web site, through the use of standard web security mechanisms (a simple login will work just fine, and will restrict access to the environment in the same way it restricts access to the web page that contains it). In this way, a developer could have a chat enabled community space that required the user to have a valid login name and password, if they desired.

I think it is important that people here understand that community, while part of the story, is not really the main part of the story going forward. Atmosphere has become a very broad platform (and will become even broader as time goes on), and can be used for a wide variety of experiences on the web and in PDF documents. Please check our web site (www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere) to read the current market positioning of the platform in more detail.

I hope you will all continue to work with Atmosphere in a variety of contexts and enjoy community features to the extent that you wish to use them.

Michael

[Satterfield]

I for one am a happy puppy to see Microsoft cut back their chat services. Praise God!

[Laurence Tux]

I think that M$ dropping chat due to "liability" is a load of bovine proccessed grain (steaming)

Microsoft is dropping chat for one reason and one reason only

THEY CAN'T MAKE MONEY OFF OF FREE CHAT

[superted]

Thanks for the input Michael :)
Though i can't help look at something of an irony here. I've always thought for a product like this to succeed in the market place, you need to have a strong community behind it. In a self referential kind of way, Atmosphere facilitates community & its own support for itself. With chat disabled in homeworld (etc), we've only really got the Forums for community, and i think this weakens the overal strength behind the product. A little ironic that a product for a medium of community, isnt being used for community by the people that want to build a strong community behind it. :)

But of course we've been though this before, and atmo has a billion other things going for it :)

[Atmospherics]

I did away with 'chat', way before the homeworld hoo-ha precisely because of 'nefarious characters', idiots and irritants. I felt no liability for their actions while some of them swore profusely and made flippant remarks about terrorism and sex. But I shut them up anyway.. lol, because I could! At least in my worlds. :-)

Silencing all for the few? Too right. Death to text messaging, 'chat' and the simplification of language! Revive the art of conversation and chat might be worth enabling.

Eddie

[riccardo franco]

superted wrote:
"...A little ironic that a product for a medium of community, isnt being used for community by the people that want to build a strong community behind it."

I agree with you superted.
It's not only ironic, it's non sense.

[Loq]

My .02 worth.
Chat enabled cooperation between Atmo addicts and served as a means of learning the basics of Atmo when it was difficult for some "newbies" to grasp the inner workings of how to make a world, how to make an avatar, how to publish a world, how to attach a javascript to a world, how to insert an anchor, how to insert a transporter. tho there was always the API available, it still confused a lot of peolple and they usually wound up at homeworld asking the regulars, ( LadyBunny, Heart, Finguerstyle, Rolu, Muffdiver, Knight, Box Humana, Kojoci, JamesSF, Dreamgiver, Monk, Quyntrix, Tweex, Peen) to mention a few.
there is a lot of information still around on how to accomplish those things, the need for chat is no longer necessary, it's true that a lot of us had a lot of fun while chatting, made and lost friends, created and experimented. But it also started to turn into a collage of personalities that sometimes thrown into the same world resulted in unexcusable usage of the language.
Atmo has evolved, so have Atmo addicts and users. some of us still might need chat, some not, however homeworld is gone, but there are hundreds of worlds to visit and chat in, It's not nonsense, the Atmo universe spawned a lot of playgrounds, I still miss mine, it used to be Homeworld.