Hi friends!

Southwest is mad at me for building this, so I have to take it down.

Sorry for the inconvenience!
Hope it was useful!

What This Was

Checkintomyflight.com was a website that automatically checked you into your Southwest Airlines flight. I (Nikil) built it as a fun little tool for myself. I recieved a Cease and Desist letter from Southwest and had to take down the site.

The Story

I was visiting my sister at Wharton for her birthday and my mom decided that it was time for me to start checking in to my own flights. I landed and got to her dorm and decided that in the hour or so before we went out to a party, I could write a program to automatically check myself in to my Southwest flights so I wouldn't forget.

The basic script was up and working before we went out and I didn't touch the project after that. A few weeks ago I decided that I wanted to finish up all of the random small projects I had started and finished up the check in program and made a website for it.

What Happened

I literally thought that no one else would care about this and was stunned to have 10,000 people on it in a few weeks. Here's a summary of what happened over the past couple weeks.
Oct 2 Post on Facebook
(to force myself to have a deadline)		 ~300 People Check It Out
Oct 5 Top Story On Hacker News ~5000 People Visit
Oct 5 Add Like And Tweet Buttons Discover it has already been shared on Facebook > 130 times
Oct 6-15 Lots Of Fb Likes And Tweets Thousands of People Visit
Oct 16 Written About By Travel By Points More People Visit
Oct 17 Featured By Million Mile Secrets More Than 1000 People Visit
Oct 18 Cease And Desist From Southwest Apparently they read travel blogs not tech news
Oct 18-23 Talk To Southwest Immediately agreed to take the site down
Oct 23 Picked Up By Palo Alto Online This was crazy
Oct 23 Front Page Of Hacker News Again Walking down University Ave, getting a Gyro for dinner and ran into a friend who said "Hey I just saw that you were getting sued on Hacker News".  Me: "...What?"
Oct 23 Radio Interview for KGO Couldn't believe this
Oct 24 NBC Bay Area Got a call that woke me up while I was in bed in the morning saying that they were on Stanford's campus looking for me. After I told them I didn't live on campus they said they would be at my house in 30 minutes. Remember, I'm still in bed.
Oct 24 Front Page Of NBCNews.com Got a random email and didn't expect for it to be on the front page!
Oct 24 Took Down The Site :( Oh well. Time to move on to more serious things like howtobluesteel.com
Oct 25 Front Page Of Business Insider Like most of the other news articles, I didn't even realize this was up until somone emailed me and told me about it.
Oct 25 Tweets of support from famous people I think I should check out this Twitter thing
Assorted press: Host Jury, Stanford Daily

Overall, I was really happy that I was able to make something useful that helped a lot of people remember to check into their flight! I was was pretty blown away to see that approximately 10,000 people were on the site, especially when I thought that NO ONE else cared about it.

Thoughts