Bianca.com
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- The correct title of this article is bianca.com. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
bianca.com is an alternative virtual community that was created on 14 February 1994 by a group of San Francisco-based dot-com software developers including David Thau and Christopher Miller. bianca was the world's first web-based chat room.[citation needed] It later also became a popular theme camp at Burning Man.
The site has long been infamous for its extreme free speech and raucous discourse, and its sociological effect on the Internet and elsewhere has been extensively detailed in a thesis by "Freeform" (Miller), [1] who studies bianca-style chat rooms as a sort of petri dish for incubating deviant behavior:
Initially the posts in bianca's chat rooms could be of any length. If a user had a 100 line long poem they wanted to post, the chat software would have accepted and posted it. This was acceptable when bianca was a smaller more closely knit community. However, as bianca grew more popular, racist homophobic hate mongers eventually found their way to bianca, and they too could post 100 line long rants if they pleased. As the bianca site prides itself on allowing all users freedom of speech, the content of these hateful messages was not a problem. However, these individuals posted their rants over and over and over again, totally disrupting the feel of the room, and almost bring the system to its knees. [2]
In 1997 Radio Shack sought to prevent bianca's "Smut Shack" from using that name, citing their previous use of the word "shack" and claiming exclusive use. They later backed down from their legal action.
In 1999 the site was purchased by professional pornography site Nerve.com, but by 2001 they'd given up on the venture due to excessive bandwidth costs. Nerve announced bianca's impending closure, though Thau vowed to find a way to preserve at least part of the site. [3]
In the final days of Bianca’s full-fledged operations, sometime around late 2003, the once friendly community had totally degenerated into a tangled mix of spam, infighting among members, hacking, flooding and general chaos. The chat rooms were no longer a place where friends met, but became a sounding for rival factions, and The “topic” forums more resembled a meeting place for hate groups. According to many former “Biancanauts”, the site, bianca, could have been saved, simply by charging for membership and banning passwords and IP addresses of those who misused the site. This, according to some, would have met the bandwidth costs, as well as stemming the exodus of members who were driven off by what had become a haven for Internet vandals. Thau, Miller and the other Admins however, were apparently more willing to let the site go under then to compromise the “all inclusive” theme that the site had been founded on.
bianca's smut shack still operates today (somewhat), though it is uncertain who is maintaining it and by what means. Their "What's New" page hasn't been updated since 2003. The chat rooms, which worked until September 2006 in a simpler, stripped-down format (no more "Shacklet" icons or customizable handles), no longer work, however. When one tries to use them, one gets a "Sorry" message which states the system is unavailable and to try again in a few minutes (when they still do not work). The rooms have not been active since at least early September 2006. [4]
[edit] bianca.org
The sister-site bianca.org houses some information about the core group involved with bianca.com-related real world activities. This site claims:
bianca.org is the real-world extension of the online community known as bianca.com, which doesn't necessarily mean that we bare [sic] [sic] any resemblance or likeness to any of the activities of bianca.com but we do take our name and spirit from that which is the great bianca!
