Payphone Go is good old-fashioned internet nonsense

One of the many things that the social media age has robbed from us is an abundance of daft play-ish projects, invariably cooked up by some developer in San Francisco, of the sort that used to be announced on Boing Boing and written about in Wired magazine. Back in the early 2000s such things came along with pleasing regularity, in part because they were rationed out through blog posts and magazine articles rather than dropped into the firehose of social media.

Nowadays San Francisco is the global source for dead-eyed AI boosterism, Cory Doctrow is posting through it on social media with everybody else, and Wired is focused on documenting contemporary warfare and the rise of the surveillance state. It was more fun when all this was Flickr and Feedburner, which is one of the foundational beliefs that lead us to launch Jank in the first place.

This is why I was delighted to come across Payphone Go. Its origin is pure early-2000s SF nonsense: somebody realised that there's a public record of the 2,203 payphones still remaining in California, and has built a natty and totally superfluous tool which enables you to "claim" each one by calling it.

It's a simple, one-shot page on a minimalist personal website with a leaderboard and a map API, which is the sort of thing that used to feel thrillingly exciting back in Webs 1.0 and 2.0, but now feels thrilling because it's not packed with programmatic advertising or trying to monitor you for commercial reasons (as far as I can tell, at least).

At the time of writing there are still more than 2,000 payphones to claim and there are five days left to do it, so if you're in the USA then you can indulge in some toll-free calls to claim a spot. If you aren't, then just cherish the fact that people are still making this sort of thing, and we've got a blog to highlight it.