The Hurricane Cafe on Seventh Avenue and Bell Street can be a very quiet place at 9 a.m. on a weekday, and last Friday was no different. Open 24/7, the venerable downtown haunt tends more toward the 3 a.m. lip-pierce set. But on this partly sunny morning, the patronage consists of three burly laborers, a couple of middle-aged tourists, and a lanky septuagenarian in a straw cowboy hat, ingesting a Bud longneck, hot dog, and ridged potato chips in front of a plasma screen at the breakfast counter.
A very strange plasma screen, at that—one featuring frequently updated messages like “my ostrich had a current affair with Ali,” “the Bonesmith haunts my dreams and Chula Vista,” “Nose-pierced fox in booth four: Tu eres en fuego,” and “Tito loves Cory, but only if she drops 24 lbs.”
Welcome to the wacky world of Wiffiti, which is best described, in short, as text messaging meets karaoke meets Jean-Michel Basquiat meets Match.com. The Hurricane is the local guinea pig for the budding phenomenon, which its aspiring creators hope will become the next megafad in the handheld communication realm. Messages such as the aforementioned appear in variously sized fonts and are specific to Hurricane patrons or those who’ve got the screen’s access code plugged into their cell phones and BlackBerries. So theoretically, if one thought the dude with the Fu Manchu and upper-back hair two booths down was shagworthy, one could say so on the Wiffiti screen in hopes of landing a slice of apple pie and a peck on the cheek (tastefully, mind you—the messages are moderated/edited for naughty lingo). Or one could conspicuously let her waiter know that she needs a refill on the Joe, or that her bacon came out soggy when she wanted it crispy. Stuff like that.
LocaModa CEO Stephen Randall, who runs the Boston-based company responsible for Wiffiti, thinks he’s got his fingers on the next big thing. He also rejects the notion that Wiffiti impairs the social development of humans.
“What’s happening now is we kind of need technology as a prop,” says Randall. “You go into a Starbucks, and you see people on laptops working, and they don’t look up. The Wiffiti screen gets people to look up and socialize. A screen in a location gives people a way to say, ‘This is my voice, and maybe you want to talk to me.’ Also, I think it’s easier to take rejection than walking up to someone and offering to buy them a drink. So I think the technology is actually helping interaction, not hindering it.”
The Hurricane’s cost-free Wiffiti screen is sponsored by Network Truth—the people behind those antitobacco ads—which is sort of ironic, considering the Hurricane’s coffee and cigarettes ethos. A small sponsor logo appears in the corner of the screen; that’s effectively LocaModa’s moneymaking model.
“[Truth] is managed by Arnold Worldwide in Boston,” says Randall. “They came to us with a similar problem as a lot of [ad] agencies—that kids aren’t watching TV. What we evangelize is we believe the Web isn’t going to stop at the desk or the couch. Screens and phones are ubiquitous, and we’re connecting the two.”
Randall says he approached the Hurricane, currently the city’s only Wiffiti purveyor, after a tip from “a guy who was working on the [Howard] Dean campaign.” Initially, Hurricane owner Neil Scott says he thought Wiffiti sounded “corny,” but after giving the screen a test drive before a pack of his late-night devotees, he came around.
“What they’re going for definitely fits a lot of our clientele,” says Scott. “It’s definitely more popular with the late-night crowd. They’ll write stuff like ‘cute girl sitting in the blue shirt,’ but most of it is just random thoughts. They’re trying to promote a freedom of speech type of thing.”
Moreover, it appears that they’ve got Cupid on their side—or at least logged on to their network. Says Randall: “We’ve had loads of marriage proposals.”
