ChitChat was an offshoot of "miChat!", a Yahoo! Chat program for Macintosh computers written by J. Seth Lowe in the REALbasic programming language. In late 2000, Seth publicly asked for other REALbasic programmers to join the project, in the hope that it would spawn a number of competing Yahoo! Chat clients and enrich the Macintosh experience. A programmer by the name of Tomis Erwin responded to this query. After collaborating on several features, Seth encouraged him to take free rein in creating his own client from the miChat code base.