Kerim’s been busy with the stickers!
We *heart* that, Kerim!
Archive for the 'Design' Category
Probably the most requested feature is the ability to save the original date of your SMS. It’s impossible for us to do from the forwarded SMS so instead people have been diligently using sticky notes and even appending the original date and time to the messages saved. We’re wondering if this is people doing it themselves or if there are actually some phones out there that are doing this for them
So implementing a feature to allow people to change the date has been on the todo list for a while and it’s finally coming into existence. Here’s a sneak peak of whats coming. The UI comes from the JQuery datepicker extended with a timepicker with a few special modifications.
… just a tiny little preview on my flickr account (we couldn’t quite wait till it goes live and we take the invite only signs down). - Which will be very, very soon!
A few preview pics of the forthcoming “Treasuremytext for iPhone” application are available on my Flickr account. We’ll launch it this week hopefully.
Simply it lets you archive your favorite SMS from your iPhone to Treasuremytext (via EDGE / Wifi) so it’s totally free. Whilst we’re waiting for the iPhone SDK to come out we thought we’d get going with our own version for jail broken iPhones. More on this very soon.
We’re experimenting with / evaluating various bits of operations software for Treasuremytext2. Can’t remember how we heard of Pingdom, but we’re glad we did. Pingdom is website monitoring made easy - and very cost effective. Whilst there are a lot of more complex services in this space, if what you really want is something that tells you if theres a problem then this does the job. And at $9.95 it’s a bargain!
The last time I had to make a favourites icon with it being a windows .ico file and me being on a Mac meant an afternoon of trying to find instructions about how to do it & then tracking down oddball plugins for Photoshop to do the task.
Today a 0.13456 Millisecond search on google for ‘How to make Favourites Icon’ yielded HTML Kit. 30 Seconds later I had my new heart shaped Favicon which should now be displaying in your browser if you visit the beta.
It includes an option to make an animated scrolling one just for some late 90’s web throwback feel. I resisted as I think we’ve already gone to far with our under construction animated gif
It’s only a small thing but it keeps underlining how much the Web has shifted in just a few short years from being mostly a resource of hyperlinked documents to being a place of services and applications. A few years ago it gave me instructions on how to make a favourites icon, now it gives me the actual service to accomplish the task, web you’ve come a long way!
And so we’re about to start inviting beta people, now I’ve got my background sorted out it’s all good! Speaking of backgrounds I just love my new pink heart theme to my SMS ‘Soap Opera’ Text Stream. However we will hopefully be making a set of cool and ultra sophisticated backgrounds for use in Treasuremytext2 and elsewhere. I think we’re gonna ask Charlie Nelson (our chic fashion designer friend) to help us out on that.
I had hoped our Treasuremytext2 beta would be live by now. It is very nearly live and we’re having a ’specially invited guest preview’ (to iron out any alpha bugs) next week, but we do actually have some genuine reasons for the delay. So without sounding too much like we’re not sure about *stuff* I wanted to explain about our change of heart regarding a couple of our more socially oriented ideas.
Being an ‘early dopter’
I’d class myself as an early adopter of web2.0 (blogger, facebook addict, social media strategist etc). I like ‘lifestreaming’ lifecasting, passive publishing, presence and future presence, portable, tight, close and loose networking stuff.
The Treasuremytext Proposition: It’s Personal Storage (and everyone gets it)
Since we’ve been (re)making Treasuremytext as a web2.0 app, when we start describing it “A mobile to web app - save your SMS online” some people have tended, over the last few months to reply “Oh, you mean like twitter, or jaiku“… Well, in so far as you send a SMS message and it ends up on a web page, yes, but in other respects, no. I love those services, and I use them (but I’m a geek / 2.0person / early adopter / social media tart). And I like using such services for that ‘what I’m doing now’ shouting type ’status’ updates.
But…Treasuremytext is about personal storage and “personal storage” is not ‘lifecasting’. The ‘Treasuremytext specific’ need I have is to store things I feel are important. And I don’t want to treasure important stuff on twitter.
So whilst we’d love Treasuremytext to be as popular as twitter, we have to stay focussed on what it is and what it isn’t. We know that our users love the service, and that more people want to keep with mobile stuff. And that whilst social features help in the network effect / marketing / growth we have to stay focussed on doing the core stuff well. We have many thousands of users who just want to keep their SMS safe online. They ‘get’ personal storage, and I’m not sure they ‘get’ lifecasting. Whilst many of them are media ‘literate’ they’re not the web2.0 / geek crowd. They are the millions of people who just love SMS.
So the delays?
So the delay in launch is about that - we’re slightly reworking a few social features - which whilst ensuring our text treasuring fans can publish, republish, promote and ‘connect’ - that we’re not forgetting the well loved, well tested concept of ‘personal storage’. Also, we also recognise that if people want to text chat with friends they should use twitter and if people like me want to lifecast by mobile or via feeds they should use jaiku. We’re just making a few tweaks to ensure we keep personal storage personal.
Personal Content Manifesto
Is “private-personal” making a come back? Some of us like doing everything online and in public, some of us just want to keep stuff. Hey, as long as there’s something out there for everyone, it’s all good.
Treasuremytext2 beta is coming very soon - it’s about treasuring texts; loving your SMS.
Very soon, honest!
Image: Duncan on Flickr.
So our schedule for beta launch is:
September: Treasuremytext2 powering PICNIC’s SMS Backchannel
Early October: Invite Only beta launch
However, we do have a sneak preview….
In the run up to the launch of Treasuremytext2 we thought we’d share a few stories; this one’s of the design / fashion / web design trends variety…
We were working on a range of ideas and thinking about setting up Kisky Netmedia to develop mobile services back in 2002. We were then based in Manchester, England, and I recall a particular moment in a bar on Canal St when we thought about the personal issues around SMS, that we had phones which would only store 15 of them, and that we really really wanted to keep more of them. We set about devising systems which could capture mobile content, particularly SMS, and later that year the company was incorporated and “Treasuremytext” began production. Credit has to be given to my sister Caroline for the name which we still love to this day as it says it all really - and a lot of people really do ‘treasure their texts”, (or their SMS, as the Europeans call them)!
So we had a great concept and a name and so we began development and in late 2003 we were ready to rock with Treasuremytext.com. Since its launch it has gone from a shaky start in terms of user numbers to a steadily growing loyal following. What we thought about phones getting more storage capacity simply wasn’t a problem; it seems that people do really care about (some of) their mobile content and want to treasure it.
So before we wow our readers with previews of Treasuremytext2 we thought we’d share a few glimpses at Treasuremytext past (courtesy of the fabulous Way Back Machine). It’s a bit like looking back at old pictures of yourself in ‘the height of fashion’; and it sure makes you realize how design for the web ‘ages’ quickly.
One thing we should be happy about however is our original plans for the social side of things; publishing, comments, & ratings were all built in right from the beginning. What I can promise however is that Treasuremytext2 is going to be a lot slicker, super Ajax-faster, and a little less pink than these lovely designs.
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