Conversations with Mike Yuan have lead to a ton of weird stuff, usually in the form of short lived Twitter memes or black and white jpg's with swear words on them. This time, it led to a blog idea: what if we made a site just for us and our friends where we posted conversations from afar.

Mike moved to San Francisco this year, and it sucked. Imagine Venkman without a Spengler. Yeah, it was that bad. On the upside, we started talking on iChat a lot more. It gave us the idea of documenting the weirder, funnier, more incriminating parts of our conversations in a way that would allow us to share it with other people. Taking it a step further, I decided that we could include anyone we spoke to over iChat that once had a meaningful role in our lives, but is now distant to us (emotionally or literally).

As much as it sounds like some type of preachy social experiment, I promise you that it isn't. It's merely a way of taking conversational snapshots to share with others for the sake of humor. However, there is one bit of existential drivel I feel I must force you to endure. At a time when nearly every online "social" device includes options to hide our private selves from the rest of the world in an impenetrable fortress of "you-must-be-my-friend-to-see-this"-itude, this site is meant to do the exact opposite. It makes our private selves very visible to any passersby: an endeavor I see as much more honest than hiding your online identity to protect you from a prospective employer/significant other/neighbor's nosy Google queries.

The site is handmade and intentionally lo-fi. A large amount of polish wouldn't have fit the intimate, casual feel, and may have scared off potential conversational exhibitionists from signing the necessary releases. Each side of the conversation is presented in the iChat-esque bubbles on either side of the speaker's portrait (which changes depending on who is speaking). It's currently in development and will be launched at a later date.

Site was made with Micron pens and copier paper. It will be built in HTML/CSS and integrated into the Blogger platform.