BarTalk in Development

October 28, 2008 – 2:55 pm

BarTalk is a new service that allows you to chat anonymously with other patrons at the bar. Every message sent will be distributed to every other phone logged into the service at that time. You can challenge others to shots, divulge your crush, or let everyone know that your pal is passed out in the corner so everyone can get their picture with him, or her, it could easily be a her too. Gossip all you want. What the hell, it’s anonymous right?

Here’s how it works:

Text ‘oscar’ (no quotes) followed by your message to 41411. For example:

oscar happy bday!
oscar you’re late

Send your text anytime tomorrow, and you’ll automatically be logged in for the evening. You can easily unsubscribe at any time via a reply (simple instructions included in message), but we don’t recommend that because you’ll be missing out on a crazy underground gossip convention. You will be unsubscribed automatically and forever the following morning anyway. If people use it and like it we’ll do it for every future TNO too.

Only one disclaimer: please don’t hurt anyone, just have fun with it!

Also, to whomever is actually hosting TNO, bartenders can get in on this too. They can offer a free beer to the next idiot who takes his shirt off, beer specials for first person to recite the contents of a message, and so on. Bartenders might want to participate too!

Ok everyone, please try this out, for real, cuz we think it’s cool and fun. We will appreciate your feedback after the night is over. Thanks and have fun!

A few questions answered

Q: How does this work?
A: Well it’s built on a service called Textmarks (www.textmarks.com). It’s free and great for prototyping mobile applications

Q: Is it really anonymous?
A: Well it is assuming that you are not already a member of Textmarks, where you’d have a username associated with your phone number. Even then people would have to know what your username is.

Q: Is this spam?
A: It’s an opt-in service, so no. Be aware that while we are testing this version, you will receive every message from every subscriber. In the future we hope to have more filtering options. You can unsubscribe at any time using instructions provided in messages you receive, and tomorrow morning we will manually forever unsubscribe anyone who has not already done so.

Q: What’s up with the ads? Are you clowns cashing in on this?
A: We wish. Since Textmarks is free, we have to give something back in the form of letting them put some stupid ads in the bottom of the messages. On this issue, Josh says, “Whatevs.”

Here is a screenshot of our mySQL message database. It’s clear that our service was being used as intended.

You can try it out for yourself using this sample script.

You’ll want to auto-subscribe users just to take out a step of the process. Just make sure they know they are being subscribed. To broadcast all messages to all subscribers, set up your Textmarks configuration something like this: