Extremely popular during the mid to late 1990s in the era prior to the Dot-com bust, WBS was at that time the largest and best-known social media website on the internet.

WBS also featured other services, such as email, and allowed users to create and maintain personal web pages.

[5] WBS was founded as the Internet Roundtable Society in 1990 by Michael J. Fremont and Wendie Bernstein Lash in Menlo Park, California.

[8] It began as an "edutainment" company featuring such content as live Internet broadcasts of interviews with prominent individuals in science, technology and pop culture.

Also internet service provider AOL had over 14,000 chat rooms available to their customers through their non-web interface.

Such events attracted many celebrities such as Tom Clancy, the celebrity cast of Star Trek, bands Soundgarden and Metallica, the former president of PBS and NBC News, Lawrence Grossman, United States Senator Arlen Specter, Intel CEO Andy Grove and feminist Gloria Steinem.

[9][11] Web-based chatting in general began to lose popularity with the rise of several instant messaging desktop applications in the late 1990s.

Lycos had bought the Tripod community in February 1998 and Yahoo had added a deal with GeoCities in January 1998.

On September 15, 1999, WBS was shut down and many of the more popular rooms were transferred to Go's Java-based chat system.

After its demise, many patrons of WBS migrated to other browser-based chat sites where some of the general topic rooms were recreated.

It is likely that many WBS chatters began using instant messaging software, the popularity of which was increasing substantially at that time.

Martin Foster developed software that offered several of the features of the original WBS and IFC that had gained popularity.

This code has been used in developing numerous chat sites which have attracted many former patrons of the original WBS, especially those who frequented the roleplaying rooms.

[15] After its buyout, he co-founded Freebord, a San Francisco-based sporting goods manufacturer, in January 2001.