Historicus Maximus
The year was 2002, the phone: a Danger Hiptop (aka the T-Mobile Sidekick). Dave, with his stupid blue Kyocera camera attachment fresh out of the box, began to terrorize the Greater Ogden Municiplex. About thrice a month he posted several tiny 120px by 90px pictures on his website, not taking into account numerous victims of severe eye strain caused by attempts to decifer whether the photos were of a cat, or just his grandma. The process involved emailing the images, then uploading them, and finally adding them to an existing page, or creating new one. The project quickly floundered after three months, and updates only came in sporadic bursts, with one final attempt to cause his visitors permanent eye damage in a huge update over a year after starting.
In the meantime, camera phones began to infect the populace with abandon. The resolution was improving, but even the miserable Sony Ericsson T6xx series humbled the Sidekick. VGA cameras were emerging on real .consumer. phones, and sites like Flickr would soon be born from the mysterious need for people to share their stupid camera phone pictures with each other. Something had to be done, but what? Dave could maybe, just maybe, code his way out of a wet paper bag, but Vegas odds makers say otherwise.
Fast forward to June 2004. Jason, fresh out of school for the semester, but even fresher out of work, had absolutely nothing to do. PHP sockets happened to be the flavor of the week, and Jason decided to give them a whirl. He wrote a script to parse the images out of an email and stick them into a database. He was showing Dave all the glory of what it couldn't do when Dave suggested turning this into a moblog script, a Danger Project 2. A horrible name, as Jason had a Sony Ericsson T616, and even worse because Dave had given up on the unreliable Sidekick not much later. A better name must be found. Just then, the gods cast an inquisitive eye from the heavens and struck Dave with one of his moments of name-spiration. "How about phonese.cx?" asked Dave.
The domain was registered, the script written, and phonese was unveiled. Rivaling New Coke for largest blunder in history, phonese needed to be killed, and quick. Soon, users were filling the database with junk while the code was creating broken images and just plain not working 75% of the time. Phonese couldn't just be shut down, as it was already being abused by many members of the community, who unwittingly created its purpose: photos of pointless crap. This "inspired" Jason to rewrite the backend from scratch, using Perl, and taking caution. Within 3 months of its initial release, phonese1 was replaced with phonese2. With a slight face lift, phonese2 worked much better... for about 4 months. Soon forgotten were all of the lost images from the first version, RIP.
Five years after the domain was originally registered and phonese1 unveiled, phonese3 was released. The code was completely rewritten from the ground up in a language slightly more elegant than Perl, offering everything, but promising nothing.