Treasuremytext

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

~ the last words ~

Treasuremytext did one thing. You forwarded a text message to a UK mobile number, and the message came back to you as a row on a web page you owned. You could keep the archive private or publish it. That was the entire product, launched in September 2003 by Kisky Netmedia in Liverpool and built by Paul Stringer with Katie Lips, running on Apple's WebObjects because that is what a small British studio with Java people was using in 2003.

The pricing moved around for years. It opened at 25p a message through a shortcode, acquired a subscription tier at a pound fifty a month, and ended up free, which is the standard trajectory for a service whose costs are per-message and whose users are sentimental rather than numerous. It picked up a Big Chip Award in 2004 for best use of wireless technology and a Yahoo! Finds of the Year award in 2005 for best community website. Later there was an iPhone app, released under the GPL for jailbroken handsets, sitting on top of an API.

The part worth noticing is the date. Taking an inbound SMS and rendering it as a public web page in 2003 put Treasuremytext ahead of Twitter by three years and ahead of Jaiku by two, and it got there without any theory about what it was doing. It was not trying to invent microblogging. It was trying to stop people losing texts from their mothers, and the mechanism it reached for happened to be the one the next decade was built on.

~ the record ~

~ why the number mattered ~

The archive number was a UK mobile. That single fact decided who this service was for, no matter that its output was a web page anybody could load. From Turkey, archiving a message meant sending it abroad first, as an international SMS, on top of what Turkcell already charged per text in a market where people counted their messages. The web half of Treasuremytext was global and the input half was a British phone bill, and it is the input half that decides who signs up.

~ back soon ~

The site was healthy in February 2020, serving a normal three-kilobyte home page. By the end of November 2020 the home page was redirecting to a file called backsoon.html, which said: "Treasuremytext is being updated, we'll be back soon! The site is currently undergoing maintenance. Saved SMS are not affected. Thanks for your patience."

It never came back. The next thing the archive caught at that address, in July 2021, was a different page entirely. "We're sorry to let you know that Treasuremytext has now closed," it opened, with a waving-hand emoji. "We launched Treasuremytext in 2003 and having treasured SMS text messages for our users the world over since 2003, it is now time to say goodbye to the service." Then the practical part. The website was gone and the numbers no longer accepted messages, so anyone who wanted their own archive had to ask for it through the Facebook page before 31 December 2021. The page signed itself Treasuremytext 2003-2021.

Katie Lips wrote about the closure publicly that same July, describing it as her first tech startup. So the service's real end is a maintenance page nobody ever took down, and the announcement arrived roughly eight months after the thing had stopped working. Both notices were honest on the day they went up. The first one simply kept sitting there while it turned into a false statement.

~ the address afterwards ~

treasuremytext.com kept redirecting through 2022, then went quiet. By March 2024 somebody had pointed a fresh WordPress install at it, complete with an unedited hello-world post, and by that summer the domain was serving fifteen kilobytes of generic content. As of April 2026 it carries Chinese-language pages under a random directory name, a London landline in a tel: link, and files called seo_detail.html.

Fourteen million text messages went through that hostname. What answers there now is keyword inventory, and the only copy of the farewell is the one the Internet Archive took in December 2021.

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