The past decade has been marked by many social phenomena, and a new type of communication deserves special attention: drunk texting.
Debut
The Google search for the term "drunk texting" spiked in May 2009, three months after the launch of the Texts From Last Night website.
Lauren Leto and Ben Bator were then college seniors living in peru number data Detroit and considering law school. The city’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was at the center of one of the first “sexting” scandals in politics (not related to the corruption charges that eventually landed him in jail), which inspired the couple. They created a site on Blogspot and began posting screenshots of the weirdest texts they received from their friends, anonymously but with one clue: the area code.
“Three months after it launched, it was finals week,” Bator says. “I think people were concentrated in college libraries around the country. It was also Cinco de Mayo week. People started reposting text messages with a link to the site, and it exploded. At its peak, Texts From Last Night was regularly getting 20 million unique visitors a month. But most of the company’s revenue came from selling a .99-cent app—mobile websites were so bad in 2010 that people were actually paying for it. It was a million-dollar idea at a time when the country was reeling.”
Today, “ drunk texting ” is a household term. It needs no more explanation than “ random dial ,” “ autocorrect, ” or “ cell phones ” in general (Drake’s entire career arguably hinges on his audience’s understanding of the universality and importance of drunk calling and drunk texting as a form of social behavior). But there was a time when we needed thousands of examples to understand what drunk texting was and what it was for.
The messages posted to Texts From Last Night weren’t necessarily “drunk,” but they almost always were. The home page was a constantly updated stream of misspellings, poor decisions, and awkward randomness, scattered across time zones: in Los Angeles, someone carving a shot glass out of a “potato”; in Atlanta, someone getting kicked out of a bar for trying to make spaghetti in the kitchen; in Seattle, someone hunting for tequila with chunks of mint chocolate chip ice cream while a friend did the same with spoonfuls of plain cream cheese.