A couple weeks ago, Ernesto and I were sitting in Shade, a small Greenwich Village bar with great Crepes, drinking our third or fourth Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier, talking about how we should be developing iPhone apps.

There are basically two ways we could go about doing it as indie developers. We could try to bang out a new simple app every few weeks and flood the app store with a bunch of (mostly clone) small apps. Each is low risk and most will generate no revenue, but if one is a hit it pays for the failures. Or we could try to think of one cool idea and spend some months developing it and hope it’s a home run. We decided to try to think of a home run. If we couldn’t, then we’d just start banging out apps and see what happens.

It’s not so easy to think of a really cool idea for an app, one that might actually work, is original, and doable. We had some ideas kicking around, but they would require large content partners.

Then I thought of thinking about it in a different way. Instead of trying to think of a cool app that runs on the iPhone, think of the particular capabilities of the iPhone and make an app that exploits them. So what are the capabilities of the iPhone? Text, Photos, Sound, Video, Push Notification, Location services (GPS).

What can we do to take advantage of these features?

At this time, Ernesto was talking about Monkeyfish, an old idea he had back in the 90’s that would ‘mash up’ stuff from different people. I’m not really sure what that means, but the idea of combining stuff from different people to make a new kind of object rang with me. Also in my mind from news earlier that day was Chat Roulette, the random chat service that seems to be mostly for exhibitionist guys. I’ve never used Chat Roulette but the randomness of it intrigued me.

I jotted down a few quick notes on a piece of paper. Telephone. Push notification. Random. Time limit.

Then I asked Ernesto, “How about a game like telephone, where you record yourself saying something, then it goes to a random other person with push notification and they have to repeat it. And you can only hear it once and have only 30 seconds to repeat it. And the chain goes on until the end and you can see how the message changed. And we can tag the locations of users” Ernesto thought it sounded good. So we did some brainstorming.

There could be a problem with sending voice messages to random people, since you don’t have control over what they say and you can’t guarantee it won’t offend the next randomly chosen user. So the telephone game seemed questionable. But we could do something like it, where you create a topic and random people reply to the topic within a short time frame. At the end, we can censor the bad ones. This seemed more realistic and more likely to get approval from Apple. This would work for text, photos, and videos too.

At the end of that beer, we had the basic idea complete. We decided to do a first version with just text and photos. What we loved about the idea is its simplicity and users can make of it what they will, like Twitter. It’s a simple, random micro-blog. Ernesto is a server-side expert, so he would focus on the back end and I’d do the app. I knew it was a good idea because Ernesto liked it, and he never seems to like anything.

The next day Ernesto lent me two iPhone programming books and I got started learning Objective C and iPhone programming.