tinywords, founded in October 2000[1] by D. F. Tweney (aka Dylan Tweney), is an online English language haiku and micropoetry journal that publishes one haiku or very small poem every weekday on its website.
From 2000 to 2008, tinywords focused exclusively on haiku and senryū, publishing more than 1,500 haiku by more than 300 different authors. Recognized haiku poets whose work has appeared on tinywords include Michael Dylan Welch, William J. Higginson, Jim Kacian, George Swede, Hortensia Anderson, Jeffrey Winke, Randy Brooks, Stanford Forrester, Patricia Prime and Aurora Antonovic. Novelist Rick Moody has also appeared in the publication.[2]
tinywords ceased publishing in June 2008 and resumed publishing in November 2009, with a new focus on micropoetry as well as haiku.[3][4]
There is a free mailing list that sends each daily poem to subscribers, either by email or mobile phone (including SMS phones and pagers, and smartphones). The daily haiku is also available as an RSS web feed.
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Because haiku are so short, they can be messaged to cell phones and text pagers using SMS. The daily haiku from tinywords.com are designed to be under 160 characters, including headers, to fit the limits of most SMS devices, although messages are occasionally sent as links to longer poems. tinywords has subscription instructions for users of the major US cell phone carriers and SMS services. There is also a table that shows how to figure out your cell phone's email address based on its phone number.
There is an AvantGo channel version of the website that is specifically designed to display properly on internet-capable smartphones and PDAs.
There is also an I-mode version of the website for NTT DoCoMo's I-mode service for mobile phones that is very popular in Japan and Europe.
On the website, visitors can check out haiku published from 2000 to 2008 in the haiku archives, as well as post responses to a haiku or see what others have written on the haiku. For haiku and micropoems published from 2010 on, the more recent tinywords archive shows what has been published, organized by issue, date, and tag.