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Here's What People Are Requesting From That Addictive 'Send Me' Text Project
By
Jen Carlson
Published Jul 13, 2017
Modified Jul 14, 2017
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By
Jen Carlson
Published Jul 13, 2017
Modified Jul 14, 2017
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When SFMOMA launched their Send Me project, it was an instant success. The feature is simple, and highly addictive: if you text "send me [x]" to 572-51, within seconds SFMOMA will text you back a piece of art that, in some way, shows you that thing. X can = a keyword, a color, and even an emoji, and the image you receive is one of the 34,678 pieces of artwork in their collection.
The feature was first introduced briefly at the end of March, and was officially relaunched in June; over the past week it's gotten so much attention as word has spread worldwide, that it broke down. But the project is here to stay, SFMOMA told us this week.
"There is no end date in mind," Jay Mollica, creative technologist at SFMOMA, told SFist. "It started out as an experiment and quickly went viral, revealing a deep appetite for art among the public. We hope to provide Send Me SFMOMA as long as the public embraces it."
So what is everyone asking for? "The most requested terms are: love, happy/happiness, flowers, dog and dogs, cat and cats, ocean, San Francisco, food and music," we were told. And the most requested emoji are: 🌊 😺 🐶 😍 ❤️ 🌵 🔥 💩 🌅 🌈 Click through for a look at what some of those requests have yielded (or try it out yourself!).
You can also request colors, and so far the most popular are blue, purple, green, pink, red, yellow, black, orange, white, turquoise and grey.
In the past week, since July 7th, SFMOMA has received 2 million texts. "The project's beta test began March 31st and ran for 4 days before the major carriers blacklisted it do to its popularity (they thought we were spamming people with art)," a rep tells us, adding, "We officially reintroduced Send Me SFMOMA to the public on June 19th." Since then, the biggest issue came when Neil Patrick Harris tweeted it out to his 26M+ followers, which brought down the museum's servers and caused an outage.
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Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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