The SMS application, Joke Phone The Ice Breaker was based on the common situation of not knowing how to break through the initial silence between strangers. The target user is a single male or female who wants to start fun conversations at a bar, café or club. Most people have experienced awkward silences or long pauses in which they don’t know what to talk about. Just by sending text message to jokephone@gmail.com the user will get a simple joke.

When a user sends a SMS message to jokephone@gmail.com the user will get a random joke. If a user sends the word “geek”, “blond” or “knock, knock”, they will get a specific joke from this category. As part of the Ubiquotous Computing with Mobile Devices midterm project we conducted user tests for a week. Comments received from users include: “Very funny and useful!” and “I used it on my blind date last night.”

We are planning to build user submissions and ratings of different jokes.

Programs used: PHP, Mysql and Perl.