App pitch: coffeehouse commons

Coffee “makes the politician wise/and see through all things with half-shut eyes,” quipped the caffeinated poet Alexander Pope. It was so important in the 1600s, Bach even wrote a cantata about it. In early modern Europe, coffeehouses were more than just a place to grab a latte; they were the seedbeds of the public sphere, spawning newspapers, learned societies, and major corporations. While latter-day creatives famously spend a lot of time in cafes, too, we aren’t very convivial; eyes glued to iPads, earbudded into last.fm, our sociability is in the cloud, not the coffeehouse.

But there could be an app for that. At Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley discusses a design concept for a location-based social-networking tool that I would love to see developed. Tentatively entitled “coffeehouse commons,” it would allow caffeinated bloggers, writers, artists, and designers to share their coffeehouse-generated work in real-time. One could browse the service to see what’s happening in participating cafes, then drill down to look at�and, in good old fashioned coffeehouse fashion, discuss�stuff being made in the coffeeshop you’re sitting in.

For now the app is only a proposal, prototyped by illustrator Nikki Hiatt in the New City Reader. If you have the development chops to make it real, get in touch with Nicola Twilley.

Yes, I would download this in a moment. Yes, I am such a product of my class.