Talk City had 270 paid staff and 1,800 volunteers whose job was to keep online chat civil. In 1999 it was one of the stickiest sites on the web, ranked 16th of the top 500 by time spent per day. Three former Apple people had founded it in 1996 to build online communities that felt safe. That July, with chat rooms at the center of web culture, Talk City went public.

Apple Alumni Build a Town

Peter Friedman, Jenna Woodul and Bernard Bernstein co-founded the company in March 1996, straight out of Apple. Woodul had run the online community for Apple's eWorld service. Talk City hosted chats, events, home pages and message boards, all watched over by hosts. It also built co-branded versions of its community for partner sites. The bet was that people would gather, and advertisers would follow, where the conversation stayed friendly.

Twelve Dollars, Then a New Name

Talk City priced at $12 a share in July 1999 and listed on Nasdaq as TCTY. Ad money vanished in the dot-com bust, and the company shifted to running communities for other businesses. It renamed itself LiveWorld in 2001. LiveWorld stopped filing reports with the SEC in 2008. It kept working as a social media and moderation agency, with shares trading over the counter.

Cover: A Merry Tale, Henry Peach Robinson. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for friends sharing a story (online chat).