Jane Kim’s idea for Exquisite Texts came from the place all great app ideas come from – senior year post modern poetry class.
Last week, she unveiled her Twilio-powered app that allows anyone to submit one line of poetry as part of a poem that will be completed by other strangers texting her app. The app has already produced many gems such as the following:
The week she deployed Exquisite Texts was quite harrowing. She was busy preparing for her first tech talk at CharmCityJS, and accomplished a nearly impossible feat – finding an apartment in New York City (*rimshot*). We talked to Jane about how she got the idea for Exquisite Texts and what she thinks about code-powered art.
The Genesis of Exquisite Texts
Jane at CharmCity JS
After the post-modern poetry class, Jane started messing around with the idea making poetry collaborative, and its sentiment visible. Along with her two classmates, she first built out a prototype of what would become Exquisite Texts at PennApps in 2014. When users texted a Twilio powered number, the app would gauge the sentiment of that text (or poetic verse) and display a corresponding color on a Phillips Hue.
The project worked, but remained dormant until Janeran into Jason Rhodes, who runs CharmCityJS in Baltimore. Jason asked Jane to speak at the event last week. Once Jane agreed, she was on the clock to revamp Exquisite Texts with her drastically improved coding skills.
She ditched the Phillips Hue lights and built out the crowd-sourced poetry app, adding encryption/decryption, new middleware, and revamped the app’s data storage. When she unveiled the app at CharmCityJS, everything went great.
“The talk went really well, to my surprise” said Jane. “I think people are always really impressed with any kind of hack that involves art in some form, even if technically the hack may not be that intricate. Anything code related that involves real people and chance has always been interesting to me.”
Exquisite Texts received a ton of attention that week. And while Jane is new to the whole tech talk, internet social media explosion thing, she knows exactly why the app was so successful.
“There’s a certain kind of whimsical feeling of contributing to a black box and not knowing exactly what’s going to come out of it. If you read through any of the poems after you’ve contributed, you’ll know what I mean.
