As the web gets more commercial, more companies want to track and know the real you. The backlash against this — and the desire to have “ephemeral” interactions in the digital world — is why Andrew Busey, the creator of iChat 19 years ago, has built Banter, a chat app with no names and little storage. The app lets people sign up with any user name and discuss … well, anything they want.
Update: It’s important to note that the iChat name was purchased by Apple from Andrew Busey, but he did not build Apple’s iChat app. Jens Alfke built iChat at Apple.
Um, Andrew Busey didn’t create Apple’s iChat; if any single person did it was me (I was hired by Apple’s Mail team to create an IM app in 2000, prototyped and developed an alpha-quality version by myself, then in 2001 we hired the rest of the team and finished 1.0 for the release of OS X 10.2.)
I don’t recognize Andrew Busey’s name, although his CrunchBase profile does credit him with “creating iChat, one of the first instant messaging applications”. I suspect what’s going on here is that he wrote the very early (1997?) IM app released by a startup called iChat. By 2002 they were more or less out of business; at that time we were deciding on a product name at Apple, and the obvious name was “iChat”, but it was already taken; so Apple basically bought the trademark from that startup. (Not any code, not any patents or design ideas or anything; just the name.)