Matt Sly co-founded FutureMe, a unique service that has been featured in publications such as Wired, Salon , CNN, The LA Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post. He is currently an MBA Student at Yale University and previously graduated from Williams College with a degree in Computer Science. Visit his website here.

What is FutureMe and how did it get started?

FutureMe is as an "e-mail time capsule." It's almost embarrassingly simple - you write a letter to your future self, set the date you'd like it delivered, and hit "send to the future". We then store it and send it back to you on the requested date.

We've all had to do something like this at some point, like 4th grade, so this is just the "webbified" version. The little twist that we added is that a FutureMe letter writer can make the letter "public, but anonymous", and the rest of us can see what people are writing to their future selves, which makes for provocative reading. We are now busy going through the 30,000 some-odd public letters to choose the very best ones that we will then compile into a book that is going to be released next summer.

FutureMe was started in 2002 by my friend Jay Patrikios and I. Jay does design. I write code. We work well together. We fleshed out the idea one night over sushi and beer, determined that it was sufficiently interesting such that we should spend our own time doing it.

How long did the development process take?

Not very long at all. We built the site over a month in our spare time.

How much time and money goes into running this service?

Pretty much no time at all, really. We have made a few tweaks here and there (added the rating service, for example). The letters get sent out by a cron job every morning. We did have to do a bit of triage "re-factoring" to handle the load that we encountered after landing on the front page of Yahoo, sfgate.com, cnn.com, etc... in December 2005.

As for costs, we pay a monthly hosting fee, but we're able to cover that with Google Ad revenue.