TXTMob

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

~ the obituary ~

In 2004 I was a university student in Turkey paying for text messages one at a time and counting them. A tool whose entire premise was firing SMS at thousands of strangers for free read, from where I was standing, as an idea about American phone plans at least as much as an idea about protest.

TXTMob was written by Tad Hirsch, then a doctoral student in the MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities group, working with John Henry under the banner of the Institute for Applied Autonomy. It went up in July 2004 for the Democratic National Convention in Boston and was still running a month later for the Republican National Convention in New York. Roughly five thousand people used it on the streets during the New York week, passing along police movements and arrest locations faster than any of the organizations involved could have relayed them.

The format was closer to a mailing list than to anything social. You joined a group, and every message sent to that group went out as an SMS to everyone in it. Groups could be open to any member or restricted to moderators. The membership list had its own setting, from fully public down to hidden. There was no profile, no follower count and no archive you could browse afterward. The message either reached your phone while it still mattered or it did not reach you at all.

Hirsch kept it running as a free public service for four years while his own research moved elsewhere. On 9 October 2008 he posted a note suspending it, and by the following summer the domain belonged to somebody else entirely.

~ the case file ~

~ the subpoena ~

On 4 February 2008 the New York City Law Department subpoenaed Hirsch in connection with the lawsuits alleging police misconduct during the 2004 convention. The city asked for the contents of every message sent during the convention along with the timestamps. It also asked for the identity of everyone who had sent or received one, plus a list of everybody else who had been on the service that week. The New York Times covered it on 29 March, and Hirsch put a notice on the TXTMob front page the same day promising users he took their privacy seriously and thanking his attorney, David Rankin, for representing him.

The request was extraordinary in scope for a service run by one graduate student out of a university lab. It also demonstrated the thing every activist tool eventually demonstrates. Someone has to hold the logs, and that someone can be handed a piece of paper.

~ the line to twitter ~

TXTMob's source was published under the CC-GNU GPL, and the people at Odeo who went on to build Twitter had it in front of them. Evan Henshaw-Plath, who worked on the early code, has said publicly that they spent real time using and testing TXTMob before arriving at the idea of broadcasting short status messages to a group by SMS. Hirsch himself wrote a measured reply to Nick Bilton's account of the connection, declining to claim he invented Twitter while declining to pretend the lineage was imaginary.

What Twitter changed was the direction of the thing. TXTMob assumed a group that already existed and a reason to be in it, and pushed messages outward to phones. Twitter kept the push and threw away the reason.

~ the day it stopped ~

The suspension notice of 9 October 2008 is unusually generous for a shutdown. Hirsch wrote that four and a half years earlier SMS had been overlooked and underused by activists because they lacked the tools and the experience, and that this was no longer true. Text messaging had become central to protest planning, a number of free and commercial services had appeared, and some of them were built on or inspired by TXTMob. He said he was pleased and humbled to have played a small role in that. He also said plainly that his own interests had moved on and that he no longer had the capacity to support the project properly.

He offered to hand the whole thing to anyone who wanted to adopt it, and offered to host limited deployments for specific campaigns. The archived page carries one flat sentence of summary above the notice: offered as a free service to the general public from 2004 until late 2008.

~ the domain after ~

By July 2009 txtmob.com was a GoDaddy parking page. Shortly after that it became a German-language travel blog posting filler about the Burgenland and the climate of central China, still running under the WordPress theme somebody had installed on top of it, and it kept doing that for years. Nobody redirected the old address to an explanation, because there was nobody left whose job that was.

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