TextAmerica

» see textamerica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed this one on hardware alone. moblogging in 2002 meant owning a camera phone and paying to send pictures over a mobile network, and in turkey around then i was a student living on internet cafes and a dial-up modem at home. the phone in my pocket, if it took photos at all, was not something i was uploading from. textamerica belonged to a us early-adopter with a data plan i did not have.

textamerica launched in 2002, spun out of a telecom marketing company, founded by chris hoar. the idea was a personal photo page you updated from your phone instead of your desktop. it grew steadily, and by 2004 it had about 100,000 moblogs and 500,000 users, making it the largest moblog service in the country. for a couple of years it was the front edge of phone-to-web photos.

the ending was self-inflicted. in july 2006 textamerica started charging membership fees, and some months later it began deleting content that sat in old free accounts. people who had built years of a photo diary watched it get held hostage or erased, and they walked. the site closed in december 2007, and a lot of those early moblogs only survive now because volunteers pulled copies onto the internet archive.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the next chapter ~

textamerica was doing instagram's core move six years early, a phone camera pointed at daily life, posted to a public feed you scrolled. it did not have the smartphone or the app store to make it effortless, so it stayed a niche for people willing to fight their handsets. but the pattern it proved, casual phone photos as a running public diary, is exactly what the feed became. it was right about the behavior and early on the technology.

~ the long tail ~

what is left is mostly an archive-team rescue and a lesson about trust. textamerica taught the whole moblog cohort that a free host holding your photos can change the terms and empty your account, and that memory shaped how wary people stayed about the next services. the moblog word faded, the behavior won completely, and the site that got there early is a footnote that volunteers keep from disappearing.

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