I really wanted to buy a Nokia 8910i back in the day. And I still kind of want to, I mean damn, magnesium case and a shiny silver keyboard, look at it, it’s a sexy phone.

So you get an oldschool phone like that (released in 2003) - if you can even buy it, since they go for about $300 for a good condition one on ebay. But what can you do with it? Well you can text people. You can call people. You can play snake. And you can surf the internet on the WAP-compatible browser. That raises the possibility of creating a unique old-phone-only social network. I know that you can surf facebook on wap-phones (that’s Facebooks plan for getting the next billion people on Facebook), but I’m talking about rolling out a ruby-on-rails-based (has_many :friends) social network that does some user-agent sniffing so that it’s only accessible to older feature phones.

My only concern is that the 8910i, my phone of choice, might be too old and only have WAP-instead of xhtml-mp. Writing a wap site would be kind of painful because it uses different markup for links and forms, so you couldn’t use all the built in rails helpers. But yeah, if I knew enough hipsters to get this thing off the ground, I’d totally invent Hipstergram, the social network for people with old phones.

Because surely there’s going to be an ironic backlash against modern do-it-all phones and a return to simpler phones that are only good for updating a text status, SMSing and calling people.