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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.
That presence, my friends, was the strangely accurate text-service known as Bongo.
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.
And if you were seriously ~off the grid~, sometimes you’d receive nothing back at all.
As to how the whole process worked, rumour was that the company employed people to essentially perform some speed-stalking of the names submitted:
Which pretty much aligns with what it says in the Bongo T&Cs:
(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.
Confess to me in the comments: Did you ever text Bongo to get the goss?
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