TFLN (Texts From Last Night)
Anonymous, out-of-context text messages — labeled only by area code — capturing the previous night's worst decisions. It was the drunk-text hall of fame, and half the fun was reconstructing the disaster around each single message.
Texts From Last Night launched in February 2009, created by Ben Bator and Lauren Leto — it grew out of a sorority email chain Leto had been forwarding. Users submitted real text messages, stripped of everything but the sender's area code, and the site posted the most shocking, scandalous, and gloriously regrettable ones.
Each text was a tiny mystery: a three-digit area code and one message with no context, leaving you to imagine the whole story around it. Readers voted the entries good or bad, and the site became a defining piece of late-2000s internet culture, browsed in the same breath as FMyLife.
About six months in, the creators signed with Gotham Books (part of Penguin) for a trade paperback — Texts from Last Night: All the Texts No One Remembers Sending, released in 2010 — and apps followed for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Hollywood came calling repeatedly, with development deals at Adam Sandler's Happy Madison and Sony in 2009 and again at Fox in 2011 with Ugly Betty developer Silvio Horta, but no TV version ever made it to air.
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