It’s happening …

Whenever I hear about something late and breaking I still sometimes try googling it. Oops …

Better start with twitter. Maybe google will have a few stories tomorrow. But for now, Twitter has the latest news.

I even admit that I’ve followed games by using Twitter searches. Someone is always tweeting the score. So I know how the celtics are doing …

A lot of my friends and colleagues are holding out saying Twitter is a passing fad. Ok, you go ahead and wait.

I’m going to see what’s going on right now.

Adobe Fireworks (free trial of it is available here) is my tool of choice for creating my web design drafts, graphics for sites, and anything else that requires me to manipulate or create graphics.

Last week I wanted to create a new theme for my Twitter feed, that would be really cool. Since it’s getting close to Christmas, and there is snow and cold, I thought a nice winterland theme would be nice, and appropriate.

So how I started was to begin with a new file, and I chose 1500px wide to make sure I would go across most major monitors. Only the hugest screens will have my image starting over to the right. Next, I laid out the spacing for the two bars at the right and left of the twitter stream. This is a judgement call. I chose to space them as if it was going to be on a 1280×1024 screen size. This is the majority of windows, so it will still miss in 800×600 and 1440×900 and other resolutions. Oh well, since Twitter does not allow anything dynamic or flexible, it will have to do.

Next step, deciding on color scheme and starting to create the elements. Since it’s a wonderland scheme, blues and greens work well. So I picked a few nice colors. For the trees, I went with a few different colors of green with a little brownish tint to make it look more real.

To create the trees, I made 3 triangles on top of each other for each pine tree. For the trees that were closer to the front, I also did a ‘combine paths’ and chose ‘union’ with an oval at the bottom of the triangles, to make it look rounded. I used the ‘chiffon’ texture at 50% which looked a lot like pine branches, and I did a gradient with a darker band in the middle, to give the tree some perspective.

The closer trees, I did a ‘Commands’, ‘creative’ and ‘add shadow’ with a blue color, and then I overlaid a gradient that faded from bluish to transparent over the trees in the back, to make them look more distant.

I also made an oval with a feathered edge, to look like a hill in front, on which the closer trees are standing.

Once I saved the completed image, I used PNG Gauntlet to compress it so that Twitter would allow me to use it for my background, and I loaded it.

It took me a few hours to complete it, and I think it turned out pretty well, do you agree?

There’s a funny video making the rounds that is about Twitter. There are two main characters, a young guy and another guy in his 30′s. The younger guy isn’t on Twitter and the other takes him and shows him the Twitter world (“into the Twittersphere!!”). They end up getting eaten by the fail whale and the older character ends up lying on the floor dying and trying to tweet about it. OK somewhat macabre, but funny nonetheless.

In one exchange the younger guy asks “Why is everyone such an exhibitionist all of the sudden?”.

It’s an interesting question and I think it captures something of Twitter’s appeal as well as the reason for it’s success.

We are living in a media age, and more than perhaps ever before people are looking for entertainment in almost everything. We don’t just read news, we get it from the sources that are funny, diverse, and appealing. And the more entertaining it is, the more credible. Just look at Jon Stewart. Even Jim Cramer. It’s all about entertainment.

So in this media age, we are fans of others. Fans in a loose way maybe, but as bloggers and website owners and social media users the more entertaining we can be the more people follow us. They become our fans.

Back to exhibitionism. Why should we be showing off what we are doing this morning or afternoon? Who should care if I’m a little tired or ate a hamburger for lunch? Really nobody should. But what it I can make my Twitter stream entertainment … and say those things or other things like them, in an entertaining way. Don’t we have a bit of a desire for others to follow us? To want to be around us? Making our Twitter updates interesting and entertaining satisfies our desire to gather fans. And in this age of entertainment and media, it’s all about fans.

So is exhibitionism bad? Not really. I suppose it can have it’s excess. But it satisfies our desire to be entertaining and gives others another place to be a fan. Sounds like meeting a need in society …

This morning when a friend of mine asked if I owned an iPod, I had to tell him no, and that I was on the verge of buying an iPhone. I asked why he wanted to know and he said he was trying to sell his iPod Nano which he recently purchased. He also owns an iPhone, he does not need both, or so he decided.

Well, knowing that I had over 5,000 tech saavy Twitter followers, I decided to let them know about the Nano. That was about 9:30 in the morning.

I just said:

my friend selling iPod nano 8gb ‘barely used’ $80 email etalledo@q.com if interested – please RT!

I had no idea whether it would work but I thought it might.

I had a couple responses, one retweet and within about an hour my friend sent me an IM saying he had a buyer! It was someone who lived closeby in Denver and was ready to buy one for his child.

My question is, how else could I have found someone who wanted a Nano if not for Twitter? How else could I have penetrated into all the office buildings where people were busily working, if not on Twitter. Since Twitter is easy to use from your cellphone, I didn’t need to go door to door or make any phone calls. Just sent a harmless tweet and made a match of buyer to seller.

Pretty picture of the Nano since this blog is really supposed to concentrate on design:

So there you have it. Twitter. It’s everywhere you want to be!

Did you notice something about all this social media all over the place? Most of it you have to give away all of your private information and confirm your identity before you can join Not only can this be annoying and time consuming, but it also is hard especially if there are a lot of steps. For those of us who can only do one thing at a time, and get lost after step 2, it might never happen.

But what about Twitter?

On Twitter, you just click ‘join the conversation’, sign up and start tweeting. Anyone can do it, whether young or old, rich or poor famous or obscure. We can all just start tweeting.

We don’t have to know how to edit video, or upload our galleries, or write essays, or do more than two things in a row (max). All we have to do is tweet. And we know that that is.

How many plugins are there? Poke? Gifts? Events? None of that. Just tweets, and  we can follow people, and they can follow us. This does create natural groups of sorts, I have my own group, currently about 2700 people that I follow, and follow me. If I decide I don’t like someone, I can unfollow them. Simple and easy. If I want to add friends I add them. Quick, and start hearing what they have to say.

One thing at a time, and nothing I don’t need.