Road Rage in the age of Facebook

Online On Your Blackberry? Drivers Text Message and Post their Road Rage

Driving in traffic is full of idiotic rude drivers and your impulse to roll down the window and give the obligatory middle finger or in some people's cases whip out a 365 Magnum and start shooting.

Tech Entrepreneur and Iraq War Veteran Andrew Couch wanted to put his military communication knowledge to work and come up with a better way to communicate with drivers in a more socially productive way.

The Web site http://www.yourplates.com permits drivers to post the unique license plate number of bad drivers, or any driver for that matter, onto the INTERNET so that the whole world can know how much of an idiot and moron the driver is. The site also allows motorists to create a MySpace or Facebook type profile where you can post pictures, music, and videos to share with other motorists who may search for your profile by your license plate.

On the site, license plate numbers have messages attached that can sometimes be quite mysterious, vague, or outright nasty. The messages can be sent from your blackberry or iphone on the yourplates.mobi site and then they show up on the Internet on the site's home page for the whole world to see.

'If you ever flip me off again, anywhere, I'll find you, now that I have all of your information, I'll make your life hell. I hope u get this message.' was posted in Florida. 

Not all messages are so mean spirited, one Michigan suitor looking for his soul mate wrote, 'hi ....my name is greg....I saw you in starbucks this a.m. (8/28)...your cute....would like to meet for a drink 248******* p.s. not a stalker....can't get you out of my head right now,' and a suggestion

for better driving, 'Please leave 5 minutes earlier for work, and you won't need to drive 70 MPH down Britain Rd. Thank you!' Perhaps a response to a pro-choice bumper sticker, 'How could you kill someone so innocent?' posted about a license plate seen in Texas by one driver that needed to get something off their mind.

Andrew Couch, a new Las Vegas transplant from California, co-founded the website with Andrew Phipps from Phoenix who had patented and trademarked a Plate State License Plate Messaging System. Over one long distance phone call about the future of the social networking and mobile messaging the two decided to partner and create a social networking site that would compete with the likes of Facebook and MySpace by being a site where you can find your friends locally while driving in traffic simply by using their license plate.

Phipps says, "Society has become more open to sharing their online life, we are not the DMV and we don't give out personal details about users, but we do enhance the capability for users to share their pictures, music, and video's with other drivers that they see sitting in traffic without them having to roll down their windows and say, 'what's your phone number or what's your MySpace user name?' and on top of that we provide a place where you can safely vent your road rage."

The site is starting to get a steady stream of users from different parts of the country, with messages being sent daily along with some creative profiles being created by members. Some users just visit the site to see if anyone has posted messages to them, for them they want to know if that person they cutoff earlier 'shouted them out online'.

Law enforcement is not keen on the idea of people venting their road rage anywhere, including online or searching someone's profile. Police officers would likely suggest you dial them directly if there's a road rage incident. However, they may just want the monopoly on using their INTERNET in their police cruisers to seek out the much more personal information that big brother has access to. There is much anecdotal evidence of rogue police officers stalking women through their license plate DMV info.

Time will tell how big the License Plate Messaging phenomenon becomes and if this will be a better way to communicate your feelings to other drivers, if it does it will be bigger in users than MySpace and Facebook, as the founders of the site claim, "every license plate in the United States is already a member," as a central repository for all license plate messages, even if you're not yet a member, you may already have messages sent to you that are their for you to claim.