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    For Everyone Who Remembers Texting "Ask Bongo" For Dirt On Their Friends

    I still don't understand how this little creep worked.

    Allow me to set the scene: It's the mid-2000s. Women are styling jeans beneath dresses. "Shake It" by Metro Station is set to repeat on your iPod shuffle. And an all-knowing, all-seeing presence lurks around every high school.

    That presence, my friends, was the strangely accurate text-service known as Bongo.

    Anyone remember Bongo? You use to text a number and it would tell you everything about you and your friends??? Still baffles me how it all worked to this day when social media weren’t even that big

    Twitter: @ReeceHall147

    TikToker Eliesha Kadie unlocked this core memory for Aussies last week and I think it's safe to say that most of us had repressed the whole experience up until now. 

    If you don't remember (or if you were too cheap to cough up the $5 text, like me), this is how it worked: You'd send a person's full name and location to the Bongo phone number, then you'd wait a few minutes to receive some intel on them.

    And if you were seriously ~off the grid~, sometimes you'd receive nothing back at all.

    my worst rejection was when bongo, an automated SMS bot that tells you gossip about your friends, ignored my text

    Twitter: @shaaddsouza

    As to how the whole process worked, rumour was that the company employed people to essentially perform some speed-stalking of the names submitted:

    Which pretty much aligns with what it says in the Bongo T&Cs:

    (Un)fortunately, social media has come a long way since the '00s and, in a way, made Bongos of us all. Which at least means you don't have to cough up $5 every time you want an update on your ex.

    Confess to me in the comments: Did you ever text Bongo to get the goss?