Merhaba Yabancı
A Facebook app from 2010 that paired you with one stranger a day, for 24 hours, and showed each of you the other’s Facebook profile only when both agreed.
| Catalog ID | MDSW 24 |
| Category | Personal Project / Social App |
| Project Status | Lost (no public record survives) |
| Involvement | 2010 · Sole developer |
| Stack | PHP, MySQL, AJAX, Facebook Platform (canvas app) |
Merhaba Yabancı, “Hello Stranger”, ran inside Facebook at apps.facebook.com/merhabayabanci. Every day it introduced you to one stranger, and the two of you had 24 hours to talk.
Nothing about the other person was visible at first. Each of you saw a link to the other’s Facebook profile only if both of you agreed to it.
I built it alone, in PHP and MySQL. There were no WebSockets in my toolbox then; the chat checked for new messages with AJAX requests, without reloading the page. If the other person was not on the page, their messages reached them by email.
After launch, a friend who worked as a developer at a game company told me they had talked it over there and wanted to buy it. I didn’t sell. The chat ran on polling, and I didn’t want to sell my friend’s company something I didn’t trust to grow.
I never marketed it beyond telling my friends, and it stayed under fifty users. Its costs were rising, and I had found no way for it to make money, so I decided it was not worth more of my energy and shut it down after a few months.
The app lived inside a Facebook frame, behind a login, so no archive ever captured it, and the account it belonged to no longer exists. What remains is my own correspondence from 2010: the app’s address and the interface copy a copywriter friend wrote for it.