Honk

My thanks to Honk for sponsoring last week at DF. Honk is a brand-new real-time messenger that displays what you and your friends type in real time. With no send button and no chat history, it’s the closest a chat can feel to a real life conversation. Since launching at the end of 2020, users have typed over 250 million characters on Honk.

To get someone’s attention, Honk them. Once you’ve typed a message, clear it, and it’s gone forever.

Back in ancient times (the 1990s), when we college students used the internet by telnetting into Unix servers at college (ssh hadn’t been invented yet, we just sent our passwords over the wire in plain text — true story) there were programs like talk and ntalk that did this same basic thing. You talk at the top, I talk at the bottom, we each delete what we wrote whenever we want. Super casual, very fun. Honk has that same casual, fun feel — just totally modernized for today’s mobile/emoji era.

Download Honk from the App Store.

★ Sunday, 24 January 2021