ThePalace.com is a website that caters mostly to teenagers, especially girls, for chats with an elaborate avatar system. ThePalace.com was created by Jim Bumgardner. Originally produced by Time Warner Interactive, it was then sold to Intel, at which point it became a stand alone company called The Palace Inc. It is now run by Communities.com, formerly Electric Communities.


Three sample avatars
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The specialty of ThePalace.com is that members can create avatars or images to represent themselves as they move around and among the virtual rooms. Once the member has created an avatar to represent herself or himself, the member can pick up various pieces of clothing or other items, such as hats, handbags, cans of soda, candy bars, bicycles, or hand tools. As the members move their avatars around a palace, they can type messages to each other. Often everyone in a room is talking all at once, and, resembling a party, you can select whom you want to talk to and pay attention to.

There are many avatars on the sites that members can select, such as a girl in jeans or a guy in a baseball cap and baggy pants. Or the members can use their own graphics packages on their own computers to generate custom-made avatars.

ThePalace.com is an ad-free site that provides a central community to organize the many servers of the "palace community." The "palace community" is an international community, and you can select palaces that speak mainly German, Spanish, or French, just to name a few languages.


Sample room in a palace
You can play chess with someone by inviting them to the chess table

In addition, ThePalace.com provides free software, including free software to

  1. manipulate the member's avatar
  2. run a palace server, should the member like to design a cyber palace to which the member could invite the whole world-wide palace community.

ThePalace.com is aimed towards teenagers, but for adult members wishing to have "serious" conversations, the website also provides links to adult-only sites.

See also: List of Wikipedia articles based upon websites

External links