Mark Jaquith on Tech

I had a bunch of fun at SXSWi 2008 with the b5media crew.  We rented a big ranch house 15 minutes outside of Austin, and we had an absolute blast.  As alcohol flowed freely and conversations wove their magic, there were countless little snippets of conversations that, when overheard from across the room, were marvelously funny.  It didn’t take long before people were suggesting someone put up a ThingsDarcieSays.com website, to chronicle the hilarities of b5’s office manager.  Then there was going to be ThingsSheaSays.com, to do the same for one of our bloggers that was staying with us.  This, of course, if very inefficient.  I happened to see that wasoverheard.com was available, and snagged it.  It sets up nicely for wildcard subdomains like darcievany.wasoverheard.com

Next, we needed a way to add things that people said to the site.  Twitter was the obvious solution — the benefits being mobile addition (while the quote is fresh) and that we could re-tweet (rebroadcast on Twitter) the things that were overheard.

Something similar exists: Overheard.it, from the talented team at Sidebar Creative.  But that didn’t solve the problem of Darcie potentially beating us to a pulp when she found out that we’d publicly quoted her out of context.  So Was Overheard takes a wicked twist on the “Overheard” (”OH” for short) Twitter phenomenon: it anonymizes it.  It’s not about who overheard it, but who was overheard, and what they said.

Some examples of people who have been overheard:

• @guykawasaki: ”Sperm in your hair isn’t terrrorism?”
• @davedelaney: “I’m not even going to tell you about the “poonami” I experienced yesterday.”
• @photomatt: ”yes I twitter, just not in polite company”
• @dustimus: “I just felt another aftershock - oh… wait… I guess that was just the gas from the burrito yesterday.”
• Someone: “You guys look open sourcey”

So here’s how you play:

1. Follow wasoverheard on Twitter (shortcut: send f wasoverheard to Twitter)
2. Keep your ears open
3. When you hear something exceptionally funny or noteworthy, send a direct message to wasoverhead in this format: d wasoverheard @personyouheard what they said

   If they don’t have Twitter, you can just do d wasoverheard what they said, and it will be attributed to “Someone.”  There is no need to add quotation marks or anything like that.  Just d wasoverheard @username what they said

That’s it!  In approximately 3 minutes Was Overheard will post that quote and sent it out to everyone following wasoverheard on Twitter.  The important thing to note is that you, the reporter, stay anonymous.  I’m not even storing the sender information in the database.

So go have some fun with that!