No. Back then not many people thought about mobile and besides, I'd been burned on an earlier mobile project when I'd tried to write a J2ME app (kind of what the first versions of WhatsApp were; photos with status messages but no chat).
Both driver and rider logged onto the shared website. It was more like uberPOP, the intention was people registered drives they were planning to make anyway like regular commutes and then you got a kind of fuzzy geo-specific chatroom thing where you could see other riders who were interested in sharing line up. It also calculated the distance the first driver would have to go out of their way to pick you up and did some optimisation around that, and it calculated fuel costs. The idea was to let people split the fuel bills. Back then I was worried about peak oil.
So you created a carpool forum. That's a great idea but the complexity is vastly less than a real-time platform to dispatch cars and with prices that evolve over time.
It was a real-time system, actually. It wasn't a forum: riders would appear and disappear on the fly as they entered routes, and it did overlap calculations. You just put in your start and end points and it'd match people with quite different start and end points if the trip fuzzily matched subsegments.
Both driver and rider logged onto the shared website. It was more like uberPOP, the intention was people registered drives they were planning to make anyway like regular commutes and then you got a kind of fuzzy geo-specific chatroom thing where you could see other riders who were interested in sharing line up. It also calculated the distance the first driver would have to go out of their way to pick you up and did some optimisation around that, and it calculated fuel costs. The idea was to let people split the fuel bills. Back then I was worried about peak oil.