I remember as a child occasionally seeing skywriting during large outdoor public events, like pro baseball games of town fairs. Somebody would hire a plane to write “I love you” or “Will you marry me?” or publicity for a company with smoke in the sky, and the message would hang up there suspended for a few minutes for all to gaze up at before fading into nothing. Now we have the online version, a place where you can leave “remarkable” messages for people in a digital sky. Skywrite.me presents a new message every five minutes from “skies” around the world, Vienna, Paris, New York, etc. The sky even changes color depending on the time of day. Along with each message Skywrtie.me lists the author and the person to whom the message is addressed.

The idea of Skywrite.me is to provide a nice place to write short messages that stand out compared to messages on the myriad of microblogging platforms. Using old-fashioned skywriting as a point of inspiration was a nice idea, and the site turns out to be a good deal more entertaining than it might appear when first hearing about it. I was a little disappointed by the graphics however, not by the actual sky but by the way in which the messages appear; they are simply replaces instantaneously every 5 minutes or so. Part of the fun of real life skywriting is that you see the plane spell out the message one letter at a time, and are able to guess at the rest of the message before it is completed, and then it is nice how the message does not disappear all at once but instead sort of dissolves gradually into illegibility. I suppose it is silly, but I was rather expecting to see a cute little digital plane that writes out each message, which hazily fades out to be replaced by another after 5 minutes.
A sample of the latest messages:

“Hermosa. Solo te queria decir que estoy feliz a tu lado. Me muero por ti”
“JM Kisses You”
“Mein Schatz, viel Erfolg beim Lernen!”
“I don’t want to get up at seven tomorrow to go to my very early piano lesson! And I haven’t even practiced that much!”
“Bonjour à toutes et à tous ! Ban@niere Split vous souhaite une belle journee”