Message In A Bottle

August 5, 2006 11:21 PM

Oceangram is billed as an "online message in a bottle website." Send an anonymous message and it floats to another user in the world. They will add to it and it floats to another and so on. You'll get a bottle sent to you and you can add to it. [mi]
posted by daninnj (11 comments total)

There is also a blog called oceangram stories, where a person was posting conversations she found, but most of the entries are not entertaining.

Also, it seems that it takes a while for a bottle to come to you. Best thing is to leave the site waiting in the background and check on it every 5 minutes or so.
posted by daninnj at 11:21 PM on August 5, 2006

heh, I was anticipating the first message I got. Turns out it was a bunch of disjoined chatter that began with "I'm a piece of shit."
posted by bob sarabia at 11:39 PM on August 5, 2006

does the bottle ever open, or does it just sit there and jiggle the cork forever? Mac OSX, Firefox here.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 12:05 AM on August 6, 2006

That's a bug, it was doing it for me too, but a little while later, it was working.
posted by daninnj at 12:09 AM on August 6, 2006

Wierd bugs like that usually mean you have flash 7 and not flash 8, which you need for that site.
posted by bob sarabia at 12:10 AM on August 6, 2006

how can I check to see which version of flash I have?
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 12:17 AM on August 6, 2006

Good question. I don't know. I'd just download the latest flash plugin and see if that helps any.
posted by bob sarabia at 12:25 AM on August 6, 2006

Meh, I remember using Bottle Mail way back in 97, and that could send text and graphics.

does the bottle ever open, or does it just sit there and jiggle the cork forever? Mac OSX, Firefox here.

Check your version here. Myself, Flash 8,0,27,0 on OSX, no problem here.
posted by bobo123 at 1:31 AM on August 6, 2006

Flash 8 and Firefox on XP, and I still have the jiggling cork problem. Oh well.

Also, an easy way to check is just to right click on the page - it should bring up a Flash settings menu that will have the version number on it.
posted by greycap at 1:39 AM on August 6, 2006

"does the bottle ever open, or does it just sit there and jiggle the cork forever? Mac OSX, Firefox here."

That's all I'm getting at the moment with 10.4.7 & Safari.

The day Bottle Mail went down I was severely disappointed. In my mind it was some kind of indicator that people from different places had some genuine curiosity (if not interest) in one another. That, and the idea that this whole "internets" thing didn't have to be all about money.



Yeah I know, what the hell was I thinking.
posted by -t at 3:37 AM on August 6, 2006

The wiggly cork thing was resolved - they changed servers. On August 3, when I first heard about this site, they had a little over 100,000 messages sent since May 1, 2006. That amount has doubled in the past 4 days. If it's still not working, you can try using the IP address, which some says solved the cork problem.
And here's a more easily navigated message board.
I've spent way too many hours sending out messages in hopes of people getting something more interesting than "Hi From Russia" like I get too often.
posted by Iamtherealme at 7:46 AM on August 7, 2006