I imbedded the chat interface in Nokia’s then new Nokia 9000 Communicator phone. It was a revolutionary device that allowed Internet access. In fact, people using its Telnet facility could actually chat to people in much the same way. I made sure the virtual phone’s scroll buttons worked to emphasize the experience. I tried to arrange for certain times that Nokia’s marketing and technical staff would be present to communicate directly to their consumers and encouraged users to ask questions about Nokia’s products relative to their competitors.

There was a special password-protected administrator page that allowed the sysadmin to kick-off troublesome users, record the conversation buffer for future analysis of user issues, etc. Users could talk to each other privately or to the group as a whole just as in traditional, non-Web chat systems. They could even switch to other user groups hosted on the same chat server.