That's correct! We started work on it in early 2006 and moved to Boston/Cambridge in June 2006 to participate in the Y Combinator program (which was a lot of fun, as many have said). We had a monumentally hard time trying to get people to fund our idea. I remember having a meeting with a potential angel investor (in Boston) that said, after our full deck was done, "Well, that sounds cool, but I'll have to ask my kids to see what they think." That was pretty typical of the Boston investing scene, with regards to mobile in 2006.
It was around that time that Twitter came out (which we poo-pooed due to its lack of features). It wasn't until a few months later (and after we had run out of money and had to get real jobs) that we realized that Twitter was a much better solution for what we had wanted to achieve.
It's not a loss, though. We had a great experience and all ended up getting great jobs doing things that we love. I went on to work at Mozilla. Julia went on to work at a few startups and is now starting a pretty cool video dating site: Inlu.st, and Josh is working at Blue State Digital (he did work for the Obama campaign).
Pretty much, yeah! When that episode of The Office aired we all emailed each other - it was pretty hilarious. Of course ours was a bit more pragmatic, it would only send to the medium that would best get in contact with you - and you could use it to bulk send messages to your friends. A tool like that doesn't really need to exist in this day-and-age as everyone always has their cell phone and modern cell phones are super-capable.
That's awesome. Facebook seems to be trying to do what you did with their new messaging features. I'm sure it's totally different in some fundamental way but interesting that they went there.
