Bartab – iPhone App to Buy Virtual Drinks for Friends

Bartab is a new iPhone app that plays on the social nature of drinking, allowing users to buy real drinks for their Facebook friends:

Steve Johnson, a San Francisco entrepreneur, created a new application for Facebook and mobile phones called Bartab that allows users to send a real drink to a friend via their mobile phone, bridging the divide between social networks and the real world.

Bartab works by allowing a user to buy a $1 drink voucher good at 60 bars in San Francisco. The recipient receives a drink ticket via a text message or iPhone application. They just show the ticket to a bartender and then pay a $1 pouring fee and get the drink for a fraction of what it normally costs.

(via SF Gate)

Inspired use of online social networks to make offline social experiences a lot more entertaining.

As with other online/offline apps that deal with discounting, however, it will be interesting to see how Bartab handles coupon expiration, fraud, etc.

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