Ever wanted to talk to the other drivers that you share the roads with?

Maybe you would like to:

1. Thank them for being a courteous driver.
2. Make an offer to purchase their vehicle.
3. Send them a social message or ask them out on a date.
4. Pass on a message related to road safety or their driving habits.

This is all now possible (and super easy) with communiplate. Go ahead and install it on Facebook.

Communiplate, let’s you communicate with other Australian drivers, simply by knowing their number plate.

The system simply asks for your number plate and registration state, as well as mobile number, before connecting you with the Australian communiplate network.

Once you’re part of the communiplate network, you can send a message to any Australian driver, simply by addressing the message to their number plate. Its dead easy.

There are two reasons we decided to use Facebook as the platform for the first version, rather than say our own stand-alone site:

• Ease of development: Building Facebook apps is simpler than building an entire stand-alone web site from scratch. That saves time and infrastructure hassle. You don’t have to build a login form, forgot password, register form etc. You get pre-authenticated users just ready to hit the GO button on your app!
• Virality: Facebook is already loaded with users just itching to try new things. Its the quickest way to get a large number of interested users out of anything currently on the internet and, of course, it is saturating the news lately. However, from there you can still build your own web site front end and integrate the two. Because you still own the data behind your Facebook app when you build one. In fact, it lives remotely on your own server, not on Facebook like it appears to to users.

We were dead right, because the take up already has been awesome. We have never seen this many users so quickly take up a new web application in the first couple of days. All of the Facebook infrastructure specifically designed to allow decent applications to spread virally, truly works. We think its the perfect platform to build so many modern web apps, even before you build your main web site.

This is only very early days for communiplate, we have another thousand ideas that you will see integrated into the application over time.