Please forgive me if this book is already done an published. I was thinking of a coffee table book like Postsecret but filled with random crazy Aim conversations instead. It seems like it would be a fun BOOK to read and a new type of literature that only us young people could fully understand. For the last year I have been saving my best furious, crazy, frustrating aim convos as .txt files. Is someone doing this yet? Seems like it would make a decent book.

There would be liability issues. You'd have a hard time getting it published.

He will have a hard time getting published not because of the liability issue, but rather that AIM conversations can be boring as fuck to read.

PostSecret is successful in part because it's quick and easy to read as well as being colorful/creative.

What you're doing is sucking all of the fun out of anonymous secrets by condensing it to a few lines of black/white text.



... that being said.....

What you could start is a place for people on the internet to send you IMs - secrets, humor, whatever - and post it similiar to postsecret.com. Do it as a blog first and see what the response is. You'd be doing two things that PostSecret can't:

1.) Increasing accessbility - since postsecret recieves a ton of mail a day, not everyone's makes the cut. You have to be selective as well, but you're more accessible than he is.

2.) Providing people with a way of contacting the original poster - Posting someone's screenname may not go well, so you could have an email forwarding similiar to craigslist that still allows for anonymity. This lets people with similiar issues or thoughts to get together and communicate.

Maybe you could have whatever AIM screen name or email address forward 1 of every 10 messages sent to you put onto sidebar on the website. Like the internet's very own writing on the bathroom wall.

Sounds like a fun social experiment.

Not exactly what you're planning on doing, but just to point that this sort of thing can be fairly successful: Lauren Myracle's Internet Girls trilogy (ttyl, ttfn, l8r g8r) consists of shit written entirely in IM conversations, complete with chatspeak and emoticons...and the books have consistently cropped up on various best-seller lists. So yes, some people do want to read IM conversations.

Thankyou both! I wasn't planning on doing the book myself, LAZY! I've just got some crazy aim covos saved (like bukowski's shit) that seemed good enough to share. Then i had an idea of a ("euda" fuck liability! (no offense)) BOOK! I've had so many deep, fucked up, aim convos that messed me up. I figure the shit's readable enough to mess other people too, and then there is everyones elses crazy fucked aim convos. This couldn't actually be an original idea?! Basicly I want to fuck with people.
(dDIzzIEe! most of my good convos are between and my crazy ex named lauren. HA!)

Will you be able to get lauren's permission to include her in the book?

Those conversation versions of postsecret already exist, people have linked me to various ones over the years. You're right about them being boring, but occasionally there's gold.

Well cobble that shit together and shop it around.

See what fish it brings in.

Or, don't waste your time, it'll never see print because of the liability issues; unless the people involved in the conversations sign off of on their inclusion within your book, then you'll be all set.

The IM screennames could always be censored or changed.

All in all, it'd work, but it'd require a lot of work.