Found via WebWare: BuyYourFriendADrink.com

Pretty neat idea here… buy your friend a drink via SMS. Currently limited to a few bars in 4 select towns in New York and New Jersey.

Coincidental that I’d find this today, as I’m going to miss an out-of-state friend’s birthday party tonight (Happy BDay, Mike)… I would definitely have tried out the service if it was available at the bar in Boston they’ll be going to.

I have to wonder if there isn’t some larger platform they couldn’t piggyback on, to increase their bar coverage. Credit card companies, for one, ought to be able to manage this… a generic way to send money around via SMS. I know Discover Card will let you generate 1-time use card numbers in general. If they could figure out how to package that into a generic platform for making SMS purchases, they would own a piece of a whole new class of transaction.

Update 1: On second thought, this idea feels more like something Paypal or Google Checkout should do.

Update 2: The folks over at Webware posted an update after (successfully) trying the service last night.