Talk:Hotline Communications

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It is questionable/debatable whether this article is appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia. The article merely describes one of the numerous not-particularly-significant unsustainable companies that briefly existed during the .com boom/bust period that occurred a decade ago, before going bankrupt.

The article is not too badly written, but Wikipedia is not a catalog of failed business ventures, and should not describe all of the dead .com boom/bust companies. Only companies with significant societal impact should be included. The article is mostly only of sentimental/nostalgic/emotional interest to the small group of ex-employees of the company, and to a few diehard fans. It is not really of interest or significance to the general public, and not of any particular historical value.

The article lacks citations and is therefore mostly personal opinion (not appropriate for an encyclopedia). It is difficult to justify a claim that this ephemeral company was sufficiently noteworthy/significant to warrant having a permanent article in a general encyclopedia.

Hotline at its peak was [i]extremely[/i] popular, had millions of downloads, and played a significant role in P2P history. The characterization of this as some small company that did nothing and fizzled is completely inaccurate. Torc2 21:57, 13 August 2007 (UTC)


Peer review Hotline Communications has had a peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

"In September 2001, Hotline Communications announced development of version 2.0 of the Hotline suite had been stopped, beta versions of which had not been well received by the community, and laid off most of its employees. In mid-October of the same year, the company announced the re-hire of their engineering team "in anticipation of the release of Hotline 2.0" on their website (http://www.bigredh.com/ - offline as of April 2005). However, no stable build of Hotline 2.0 was ever released."

Note that this is what happened according to the press releases. Hotline laid off all of its staff, with the exception of a few executives left to clean up the intellectual property and business affairs of the company in preparation for sale. The rehire of the engineering team consisted of three or four members of the former team.

I'm just not sure how to word this to be non-biased.

As to the first point on the relevance of having a Wikipedia page about Hotline, I think it's worth keeping. It could be argued that Hotline was an important predecessor to AOL Instant Messenger, and, later, social networking sites, as Hotline provided a sense of community and allowed chat and bulletin board postings, and allowed users to share in their interests with friends.

216.175.100.80 05:37, 9 August 2007 (UTC) David