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These words were written sometime around 2004.

A New Philosophy Of Chatting.

PSYC has no central databases. It doesn't make a difference if a dozen or a billion people are using it at once. PSYC was designed to overcome the problems of existing technologies and does so with a radically new approach. We started our first prototype of PSYC in 1994, three years later we got commercially successful with the technology, even though that wasn't our intention.

multicasting to multiple recipients

A platform that scales without limit, in case all the world chooses to use it. Not just textual chat, any kinds of multi-user conversation and interchange, that's why we started using it for newscast subscriptions, to name one possible application. We have learned the lesson of distributing information to all recipients smartly, avoiding unnecessary replication. This is called multicast - not to be confused with "IP Multicast", which is a different implementation of the multicast principle, that unfortunately doesn't work for us.

social networking

Our social networks are growing every day. We meet new people all the time, and it's such a shame that we sometimes don't know which of our friends are friends between each other too. And it's a greater shame, that all the tools given us to learn more about our social networks are commercial websites. We think, social networks belong onto your own server or a server of your choice, just like e-mail. You shouldn't be forced to use a certain company's system. PSYC lets everyone run his own socially aware webserver and send messages to friends and their friends, too.

data sharing

It also gives you the power of social applications: Keep your blog or wiki limited to your friends. Share the music you made with friends and friends of friends, but not with anyone who just fired up some file sharing software. Make your own programs aware of their users' social networks.

presence awareness, instant messaging and friendcasting

The amount of people you know on the internet is massive. The idea of letting them know your presence and availability is nice, but can become a tough and slow task for your client or server if it has to get in touch with each of people's servers one by one. We have understood that sending out messages to friends and social networks is best achieved using our multicast strategy. In simple terms, if we have a dozen friends in Australia and we're located in Austria, we ask one of our friends' servers in Australia to redistribute our information to the other eleven buddies. that's why it is important to have our messaging technology based on a good multicast conferencing platform, and not the other way around. This distinguishes PSYC from any alternatives.

encryption

PSYC has all necessary hooks to plug in your encryption technologies. We let you choose or combine link-level encryption and end-to-end encryption. This is so obvious today, it hardly deserves mentioning. We are particularely intrigued by the OTR approach versus old PGP and considering native binding of OTR into PSYC.