Late last year I wrote about the Mobility of Messages and how the tools for archiving our ‘emotional bits’ are crudely shortsighted, lacking the means for durable longevity and personal curation.

So I was recently very pleased to discover Treasuremytext, a startup - based in Liverpool and Amsterdam - that’s been helping users archive and preserve precious text messages for the best part of five years!

Treasuremytext’s founders - Katie Lips and Paul Stringer - were motivated by issues similar to those described in my earlier post; the very personal desire to treasure those evocative, poignant, sexy, cheeky and deeply personal messages at a time when handset inboxes were often limited to just 10-15 messages.

Katie and Paul very much saw their mission as one of liberating valuable messages from mobile handsets - presaging the currently in-vogue openness of Android, Openmoko and LiPS (no pun intended!) - and placing them in a web-based archive.

The web elements of the service came about due to the company’s frustrations at trying to work with mobile operators and technologies (SyncML, SIM readers etc.) - the web was simply the best medium for personalising and manipulating treasured messages. Treasuremytext’s strategy has enabled them to maneuver around cellcos, whilst still providing value to end users; a strategy that when multiplied across many service providers rightly deepeds the commoditisation of mobile operators.

Curiously, Treasuremytext has been a bigger hit with people in their 20s, 30s and 40s and messages largely focusing on relationships - indicating that SMS is a more disposable medium for younger users and romantic messages are likely to be the most treasured. Indeed, the service is almost inadvertently aggregating unique analytics and ethnographic data of the usage of SMS over time.

The service works well - with users simply needing to forward their messages to a specific number, via SMS; though it seems some meta information can be lost (original time, date stamp, sender name). This may simply be the vagaries of SMS infrastructure and handset software, but some simple tools to manually adjust metadata for each message (sender, time, date, tag) would be useful, particularly tags - with some users saving thousands of messages, folders will no longer be flexible enough tools for storage.

The more social features of the service are actually quite reminiscent of Twitter - but that’s no bad thing, Treasuremytext has a different emphasis and, as such, will be well positioned to evolve alongside other messaging services; indeed, they’re already experimenting with iPhone clients.

As my friend Ross notes, some operators are beginning to offer similar features as part of their suite of bundled services - notably O2’s Bluebook. However, operator services are notoriously, um, *crap* and generally closed like a nun’s knickers. By adopting open data principles, Treasuremytext could again maneuver around cellcos and deepen their claim on their philosophy of openness. New platforms such as Android and Openmoko could also help to provide wider distribution and I believe there’s a strong analytics and ethnographics opportunity for them too…

In the meantime, it’s worth spending a few minutes with co-founder Katie’s BarCamp session on 12 mistakes not to make when launching your startup!