DR MUMBO: Gleater, the social media web site that doesn’t exist

The smh.com.au has published an intriguing article today about a non-existent social media website in which users communicate via charcoal drawings and messages of five letters or less.

The opinion piece, bylined to Aaron Timms, introduces a guest columnist called “Randy Moustakis”, who claims to be behind a site called Gleater which launched five years ago. In the piece, headlined “Put a sock in Twitter, Gleater is the go”, Moustakis boasts:

“Today, we stand unrivalled as the leading five-letters-or-less social networking site on the whole goddamn internet.”

 It continues: “But we’re not standing still. Recently we unveiled a set of funky new applications to monetise our position as the planet’s pre-eminent home to monosyllabic online interaction: our new “Abhor” function allows gleatees to express their disgust for particular gleats, and we’ve just completed an exclusive advertising deal with a Chatswood-based surgical shoe retailer.”