Andrew Nagy

If you follow me on Twitter, or are my friend on Facebook, then you may have seen me link to iCaff.com at some point over the past week or so. So I’m finding that it’s not entirely clear what the point of the site is supposed to be. The site has an about iCaff page, but I’m going to make this a more expanded version for those of you who know me and want the full scoop.

I’ve been using Twitter for a few months now, and every once in a while, I’ll want to say something which requires something of a pause in the middle. For lack of a better term, I’ll say it’s for dramatic effect. So here’s an example. I’ve heard experts saying that a big reason for the economic crisis is the actual mood of investors and consumers. Because they think the economy is in the tank, they spend/invest less, it gets worse, etc. I wanted to sum that up in a Tweet-able statement which I hoped was somewhat clever. I would post:

“The root cause of the economic downturn: This sucks.”

But I felt that because the ending was right there with the beginning it kind of ruined it. I would much rather post the “This sucks.” on a separate page somewhere so there was that pause in the middle. E.g.

“The root cause of the economic downturn: http://icaff.com/58”

I also was hoping other people would use it to express themselves in similar ways. I figured it could turn out to be yet another creative forum on the intarwebs where people could say something in a unique way. So since this is possibly the only website idea I’ve ever had which is simple to implement, I fired up WordPress, created a simple theme from scratch, and surfed the plugin world to add anonymous posting functionality.

One last possible question you might have is why I used icaff as the domain. I registered iCaff.com two years ago for a completely different purpose. Some friends and I used to meet once a week or so to discuss religion and philosophy, and we called the group Intellectuals on Caffeine. I was going to turn iCaff.com into a forum of sorts, but the group kind of fell apart and I’ve just had the thing dormant. When I had the idea for this site, I realized that icaff was somewhat catchy, and more importantly, was short enough that people wouldn’t necessarily have to use tinyurl or a similar service to insert an iCaff link into Twitter.

I apologize if it seems like so many of my Tweets/Facebook status updates have had these links in them lately, but I’m still trying to work out exactly what I want this site to be for me. I would hope that other people would use the site and have fun with it as well. If you have any suggestions, comments, or whatever, feel free to send me an email me via the iCaff contact form.

One last thing. Thanks to Terry Daffron, Tanner Hobin, and Justin Schmidt for helping and being sounding boards during the creation process.