Firetalk

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Firetalk was an innovative voice/music chat program, allowing users to talk to others singly or in chatrooms. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."^[1] However, if you can hear someones voice you can get an idea of the person's gender or relative age. It was not uncommon for persons distinctly too young sounding to be shooed from chatrooms that they should not have been in.

[edit] History

Firetalk was created by Multitude Communications in South San Francisco. The product, Firetalk, had its birth in a program that Multitude created called "FireTeam". FireTeam was a multi-user game played over the internet. The game got good reviews and the most favorable review came from the VoIP feature that FireTeam used so that users could communicate and plan over the internet. It was at that time that Multitude decided to branch off and create a program strictly for VoIP called Firetalk and Multitude adopted a "DBA" as Firetalk.

After two years, in 2001 Firetalk announced that it would need to shut down. Despite claiming to have 2 million users, it only had a few thousand paid subscribers.^[2] Firetalk was later bought by paltalk. Firetalk.com used to redirect to paltalk.com but now the domain has expired.