Message in a Bottle

This game is no longer running. This page describes what it was.

Message in a Bottle was a small social experiment Nick ran from September 2014 to October 2015.

After logging in (with Facebook), you were handed an anonymous message, up to 140 characters, written by a stranger somewhere in the world. Once you had read it, nobody else ever would. In return you wrote your own one-off message, which would wash up later in front of another random player. You were never replying to the person whose message you had just read. In Nick's words, it was “like reading and writing fortune cookies.”

Messages carried no names. Readers could flag anything offensive, and accounts that collected too many flags were frozen automatically.

Over its lifetime, 180 players cast 2,336 messages out to sea.

The game depended on a database and on Facebook's old login service, both long gone. The messages themselves are not published here: they were written to be read once, by one stranger.

← 6 years and 250 Articles, where Nick listed it among his projects.