Last year, on one chilly December night, Jacob Rice couldn’t sleep.

As he lay awake, he contemplated a topic most of us take for granted: communication. He thought, “Why is there no way to talk about one thing with everybody?”

Enter Every Chat: the product of Rice’s winter insomnia and a contemporary to Yik Yak. The app allows users to connect with people around the globe and discuss whatever they’d like using hashtags as subjects.

Rice spent the majority of his winter break working on the app and launched the first version of it and a [website](https://www.everychat.co/) Jan. 20. While he wasn’t originally planning on launching the app, Rice explained that as a user of Yik Yak, he wanted to create a way to bring a group of people together that were all discussing the same thing.

Rice is an application developer and sophomore computer science, pre-engineering major at MU.

A Columbia native, he attended State Technical College of Missouri in Linn for the first three semesters of his college career and transferred to MU for the 2015 spring semester.

Every Chat’s focus is to let a group of people discuss the same thing in one place, similar to a group message.
The number of people who currently have the app is 100, and there are no trending hashtags, but Rice and Every Chat Director of Communications Matthew Carlino hope to bring in more people after their official launch date.

Carlino joined the Every Chat team after seeing a flyer Rice had posted on a bulletin board on campus.

“I walked out of my summer history class, and I saw a flyer that said, ‘Let me buy your cup of coffee,’ and explained his app,” Carlino says.

He was the first one to contact Rice and since then, they have been planning for the official launch of their marketing campaign Oct. 5.

Through this process, Rice has been able to learn and appreciate Apple’s strict guidelines. He has created both an Android and an iPhone app, but he’s more familiar with Apple. At first, his apps were basic, but “they got the job done.”

Apple must review all updates for iPhone apps, and Rice has already been rejected twice.

“I’ve learned to appreciate their extremely high standards that a lot of people don’t like,” Rice says.

In Rice’s second semester at MU, he has been able to apply things he’s learned in classes to the programming of Every Chat.

At the State Technical College, Rice says “every class revolved around programming language.”

“Here, it’s broader strokes, and you learn concepts that you can apply to those languages,” he says.

While this is Rice’s first time programming an app, he doesn’t have a specific hope for the future of Every Chat.

“It’s a never-ending process,” Rice says. “I don’t have a specific hope, but it’s something that I would do in my free time anyway. It’s great experience and great for my resume.”