The original Nokia N-Gage made phone calls with the handset held sideways against your head, and the Internet responded in the only reasonable way: hundreds of people started pretending to make calls with random objects held sideways against their heads.
Sidetalking became a photo site built around the awkward shape of Nokia’s 2003 game-phone hybrid. The surviving original gallery advertises more than 250 pictures and immediately demonstrates how quickly the joke escaped the hardware that created it.
People sidetalk with game consoles, bread, laptops, toys, electronics, and objects that become less defensible the longer you scroll.
The captions are written in an all-caps, typo-heavy, overexcited voice that would be a terrible branding decision if it were not exactly the correct language for this particular website.
The whole thing feels like somebody screaming through a modem.
Then Nokia fixed the problem
The site’s later update reacts to the N-Gage QD, a revised model that moved the earpiece arrangement and removed the original sidetalking requirement.
This was objectively a usability improvement.
Sidetalking treated it as a tragedy.
The site mourned the loss of the feature, announced a final giant photo update, and eventually restored the earlier gallery for what it calls the archival web. That means the surviving site now preserves both the joke and its own reaction to the product change that threatened the joke’s reason to exist.
There is something very early-2000s about the entire mechanism.
One questionable hardware decision becomes a visual gag. A website gives the gag a home. People email in photographs. The editor captions them. The page grows. No centralized meme platform is required because the website itself is the gathering point.
The format also rewards participation without flattening everything into a feed. Every submitted picture joins the same ridiculous collection.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because Internet history is full of small communities built around jokes that would now exist as one hashtag for forty-eight hours and then disappear under newer material.
Sidetalking got a domain instead.
That turned out to age pretty well.