Carriers
My good friend Matthew and I sometimes take longer than we’d like to reply to each other’s messages. I joked that we should pretend we were using carrier pigeons, so the wait would be less embarrassing. Carriers is that joke, built.
Choose a bird (a pigeon, a seagull or a mourning dove), enter where it’s leaving from and where it’s going, and write a message of up to 280 characters. The bird then flies the great-circle route in real time, at its documented average cruising speed. A pigeon crosses Barcelona in about three minutes; reaching Detroit takes it over 93 hours.
The message stays sealed for the whole flight. Nobody can read it, not even the sender, until the bird lands and it appears as a speech bubble beside the bird. Every flight has a share link, and because the bird’s position is worked out from its takeoff time, everyone who opens the link sees it in the same spot.
Carriers is a lighthearted proof of concept built with Next.js and the Mapbox API, and hosted on Vercel.