ThankfulFor: Share Your Gratitude With The World, 140 Characters At A Time

Meet ThankfulFor, a new micromessaging site that is a “personal gratitude journal” which invites people to share the things they’re most thankful for in the form of 140 character long messages. It may sound like a strange idea, but apparently the practice of sharing your gratitude really can help improve your outlook on life (it’s a sort of reminder that things might not be so bad for you after all).

Using the site is simple: you enter up to 140 characters highlighting whatever it is you’re thankful for, and the service will send the message to your ‘journal’, which is effectively an archive of your thoughts. You can elect to keep this private or to share your messages with the world (the site lets you syndicate your messages to Twitter, with Facebook support coming soon). The site features a section where you can browse a public timeline of the most recent ThankfulFor messages which is surprisingly uplifting (you may also find some amusing and odd messages, like the person who was ‘thankfulfor’ Global Warming and Ricky Gervais).

ThankfulFor may not be an especially robust service, but in the last few months we’ve seen plenty of basic sites featuring personal micromessages take off (fmylife and texts from last night come to mind). These sites have played off our shared awkward situations, and it’s not hard to imagine seeing a site with a more positive message like ThankfulFor gaining some traction.

At this point the site is still in early stages so it’s not very feature-rich. But the site’s FAQ indicates that there’s more on the way, including support for photos and an iPhone application. The project comes from Shiny Heart Ventures – a small firm that consists of Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo.