Inside the Inbox; real people, real SMS messages, the aSMS loga by Treasuremytext

Keywords: SMS, voyeur, publish, collaborative, mobile, blog, moblog, text message, reality text

Treasuremytext.com (http://www.treasuremytext.com) is first and foremost a service that stores SMS messages making Treasuremytext.com the world’s largest SMS Inbox. Thousands of users store thousands of texts every month. Anyone and everyone can use it to aggregate their mobile content, treasure it forever and then to re-publish, re-blog, to share their personal messages with the world. The service contains RSS feeds and a ‘Slog’ a SMS log that lets anonymous viewer, or voyeurs read the personal lives of texters. Treasuremytext is a project in which thousands of users are contributing their deepest, private messages into a public space. What do people really send, and why do they want to keep this stuff forever?

We want other digital artists to work with this SMS RSS capability, and if suitable reblog this SMS content, or set up their own SMS RSS channel for other projects.

The project explores the relationships between communication and publication, trails of information, and data we all leave behind us continuously as we interact with software and applications and devices. Many people use the Treasuremytext project to publish their own communications and as they are doing so they are creating a mass collaborative consciousness.

The public face of Treasuremytext.com is humorous; it plays with the idea of the personal and the private world of mobile communication. Many publicly displayed messages are private in nature; and by publishing, the collective authors are offering a view into their personal lives.

Through this project, Kisky Netmedia (the project’s creators) are blurring the boundaries between communication ‘service’ and creative space, between application and art exhibit. Kisky demonstrates how this service is generating its own ever evolving, self-generating form, whilst also raising the bar in terms of how Netart behaves, through creating work with truly functional as well as exploratory aims.

Whilst there are distinct voices amidst the noise, the theme of the collaborative content demonstrates that mobile communication, for most of us is about continual contact; request and response, affection and confirmation. Many messages are explicit, many are needy, many are mundane, but more and more, Treasuremytext.com offers a glimpse into unconnected yet ubiquitous worlds; it shows snippets of communications, conversations, detached from each other, yet vocally loud, bold statements, request, actions, aspirations, and dreams.

The project is perhaps the only place where it is possible to view other people’s mobile communications. It is a demonstration of disconnected voices, all surprisingly saying similar things. The people who are creating this ‘not seen anywhere else content’ are becoming bolder at publishing their innermost thoughts anonymously to an unknown audience.


Kisky develops systems and environments which enable audiences to enter, use and control traditionally closed spaces. This is particularly true of the mobile phone, which is used by many, but tightly controlled by few. Kisky uses simple web technologies to open up this space, to create new creative opportunities for users and audiences. A common themes in Kisky’s work is the notion of the audience as collaborative creator; exploring ideas of ‘passive publishing’ whereby through the act of communication, there is a communication by-product; content that may in alternative spaces be viewed as artistic content.


Please feel free to use Treasuremytext.com to blog your own or existing content. Current ‘treasured text’ content is available as RSS, XML and My Yahoo feeds as well as at the ‘luxuriously’ designed site.