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Allow me to set the scene: It’s the mid-2000s. Women are styling jeans beneath dresses. “Shake It” by Metro Station is set to repeat on your iPod shuffle. And an all-knowing, all-seeing presence lurks around every high school.
TBS
That presence, my friends, was the strangely accurate text-service known as Bongo.
Twitter: @ReeceHall147
TikTok
If you don’t remember (or if you were too cheap to cough up the $5 text, like me), this is how it worked: You’d send a person’s full name and location to the Bongo phone number, then you’d wait a few minutes to receive some intel on them.
Ask Bongo
Sometimes you’d get back saucy secrets like “Kate and Brad meet up every afternoon behind the canteen,” or “Josh broke his foot while auditioning for the mixed netball league.” But other times it would be the barest, most rudimentary info, like “Scott lives in Sydney and attends *insert name* high school.”
And if you were seriously ~off the grid~, sometimes you’d receive nothing back at all.
Twitter: @shaaddsouza
As to how the whole process worked, rumour was that the company employed people to essentially perform some speed-stalking of the names submitted:
TikTok
Which pretty much aligns with what it says in the Bongo T&Cs:
Bongo
(Un)fortunately, social media has come a long way since the ’00s and, in a way, made Bongos of us all. Which at least means you don’t have to cough up $5 every time you want an update on your ex.
Disney / BuzzFeed
Confess to me in the comments: Did you ever text Bongo to get the goss?
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