“Dear FutureAssHat,
Now you have to be done with school, get married and make money. So if you’re not, you need to make some drastic changes. Like jumping base without a parachute or diving with a suit made of meat, you’ve always done it like sharks.
Once an asshat, always an asshat.
GFY
Self”
This was a future email sent on December 6, 2004 to September 1, 2004.
The popular website allows users to send emails to their future selves and lots of people are certainly enjoying the service. With the number of future e-mails sent reaching over 200,000, the site recently took off, although it has been around for four years.
Futureme.org is a media site for those who like to predict their future. It also allows for a half-time box effect, since the creators of the site claim that the memory will always be more accurate right after the event than years in the future.
Started by Matt Sly and Jay Patrikios in 2002, Futureme.org is basically just two web pages, one with the public email address and the other with the submitter email. On the next page, the user configures his future email address, chooses a date to send it to and an email address to send it to, and sends it into oblivion.
While it may seem like space-age technology that allows hundreds of thousands of future electronics to live in limbo for months or even years, such as the Grand Forks Herald, this is not necessarily the case. The technology is probably just a giant database that keeps all the invisible messages and sends them on the appropriate day. While it’s not rocket science or some sort of theological breakdown, future-emailing is kind of a cool idea.
One critical problem I’ve had with Futureme.org is that it has made a thin attempt to collect e-mails for corporate purposes – in other words, to be able to send out junk mail. The site tries to clarify that this is not the case in the Frequently Asked Questions section:
“No, your e-mail address is kept strictly confidential and should only be used to send e-mail to your future self,” claimed Clanculus and Patrikios. “So he relaxes. And maybe he’ll remind you that he’s going to relax as well.”
The crazy idea for a website that allows users to send emails to their future selves isn’t unique, but it’s arguably the first of its kind. The site has been featured in Wired, CNN, the LA Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, according to its FAQ. He also claims that he produced many “cheap imitations”, or similar models of competitors at Forbes.com (which Sly and Patrikios claim were almost the exact image of his model and after Forbes happened upon them, he later ignored them – he started to work on one project).
Futureme.org is still a leader in the future electronic industry. The free service is creative and seems to have been born entirely out of good intentions, and users have been enjoying cutting edge technology for longer than they thought possible.
Next year, as 2002 new Futureme.org users receive five years from their past, perhaps a new generation of future prediction enthusiasts will open and he will try to find out what they can say about their futures that they do not already know.”
