“When You Can’t Be There to Celebrate”
April 20, 2007
Found via WebWare: BuyYourFriendADrink.com
Pretty neat idea here… buy your friend a drink via SMS. Currently limited to a few bars in 4 select towns in New York and New Jersey.
Coincidental that I’d find this today, as I’m going to miss an out-of-state friend’s birthday party tonight (Happy BDay, Mike)… I would definitely have tried out the service if it was available at the bar in Boston they’ll be going to.
I have to wonder if there isn’t some larger platform they couldn’t piggyback on, to increase their bar coverage. Credit card companies, for one, ought to be able to manage this… a generic way to send money around via SMS. I know Discover Card will let you generate 1-time use card numbers in general. If they could figure out how to package that into a generic platform for making SMS purchases, they would own a piece of a whole new class of transaction.
Update 1: On second thought, this idea feels more like something Paypal or Google Checkout should do.
Update 2: The folks over at Webware posted an update after (successfully) trying the service last night.
Happy-Hour Mashups Reviewed at Webware
March 30, 2007
Providence Beer Map
March 9, 2007
In an earlier post, I linked to Dethroner.com’s review of 9 beer-mapping sites. I think some of them are pretty neat, but there’s at least one major problem… none of them have very good coverage of my current home, Providence, RI. Since I know there are plenty of beer-loving geeks in this city, I’d like to get the ball rolling on a Providence Beer Map.
I was originally tempted to roll-my-own solution, but fortunately I came across Platial first. It took 2 minutes to set up and WordPress has built-in support for loading the MapKit into the sidebar of this blog. Most importantly, anyone can add locations as they see fit, as well as tag, rate and comment spots. It looks like a great and easy way to start building our database. Awesome.
That said, Platial is a generic tool, so I can easily imagine outgrowing it rather quickly as we start using it to find hangouts. Fortunately, if that does happen, and I decide to roll-my-own more focused app, scraping out the spots we’ve put into Platial will be pretty easy, so entering spots now isn’t going to lock us in or anything bad like that. Sweet.
I’ll be adding to this map at a leisurely pace, and I encourage other Providentialites(?) to pitch in their favorite gin joints, etc. If you’re not local, I encourage you to start your own Platial map and post the link in the comments.
Kegulator
March 7, 2007
Just found Kegulator via http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/06/the-much-needed-beer-calculator/
Solves the problem of figuring out how much beer to buy before a party. Neat idea, although my experience with keggers is that you’re not really sure how many people are going to show up in the first place. Mashup this functionality with the RSVPs from an Evite, Facebook event invitation, or other service, and we’ll be really talking.
The Internet as a tool for drinking…
February 22, 2007
There’s plenty to talk about in due time, but for now I’d like to get the ball rolling with a log of all the cool social drinking apps out there… any I’ve missed, please tell me in the comments. Thanks!
- Mixed drink stuff
- Beer stuff
- Wine stuff
- Bar/Happy-hour stuff
More later…
