I can't remember how I found out about The Museum of Modern Tweets, but it's one of the weirdest/best things I've come across in a while. The illustrator and designer, Odessa Begay, started illustrating tweets from celebrities, but imagined them in a very different way then they were probably meant to be.

My two favorites are above, just for the amount of creativity it must have taken to really a) find these tweets, and b) create the bizarre images that go with them. I kinda' hope that Nick Jonas does own a rocket pack and a pony that eats bundles of cash.

Bobby

Earlier this week I suggested that we should organised a 'follow a museum' day on Twitter to encourage people to spread the word about all the great museums who tweet.

This idea received several hundred mentions on Twitter within hours and along with comments posted on this blog, these encouraged me to create a portal for this initiative (www.followamuseum.com).

This website will be central to follow a museum day, but the real work will take place on February 1st, and we need everyone who wants to promote museums to play a role and tweet to encourage people to follow a museum.

Your tweet might look something like this 'February 1st is follow a museum day, who will you follow? PLEASE RETWEET #followamuseum'.

Adding ' please retweet' is very important, as research shows that a message containing this is more likely to be retweeted (honestly, it works).

I hope everyone will get involved...

Exploiting a loophole in Twitter's gateway for external software, a Forbes reporter posted what the magazine claims is the longest tweet ever. What did fearless Taylor Buley do with all 247 characters? Buttered up publisher Steve Forbes, of course.

At last, libertarian political ideals can finally be expressed, on the internet. The tweet:

Yesterday we showed you an iPhone application that overlays indicators pointing to the nearest London Tube stations upon the phone's video field of view. TwittARound, a new augmented reality app from German developer Michael Zoellner, works in the exact same way--utilizing the iPhone 3Gs' integrated compass in conjunction with GPS and video data to mix data with what we see. TwittARound provides a 360 degree view of tweets made in the vicinity, so that, ideally, they could act as "post-it notes for the world," as Wired's Charlie Sorrel puts it--you could not only see a tweet regarding a great sandwich at a newly opened joint, but a marker by the place itself. Location-enabled tweets are nothing new, however, and a cursory sampling casts doubt on whether TwittARound has anywhere near as much functionality as the admittedly very cool visuals.

Scanning a one mile radius of PSFK's SoHo office, we find the following tweets:

Ahhhhhhhh.... My nerves...Breathe Neek... Breathe*

Whiffle ball has been canceled. The other team forfeited so we win!!! That gives us 2 wins and 3 loses overall this season so far.

My patience has been tested atleast 15 times today and u know wat I did..I brushed the negative energy off and smiled :-)

While the utility of an augmented reality app that points to the nearest subway stop, or the nearest ATMs, or could display the locations of your friends would be hard to dispute, are we really gaining anything from knowledge that a mediocre whiffle ball team lies to our south east? Augmented reality will garner easy attention now and for the immediate future because of its visual appeal--but developers would be wise to reflect on what exactly they are augmenting our reality with.

[via Gadget Lab]

By Sam Biddle | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming & Social Networks and app, augmented reality, iphone, Tweet, Twitter

This New York Times story on "free advertising" has my irritation levels set on maximum. That's because it's centered around one of the most persistent - and wrong - myths about social media and word of mouth marketing: That it's free.

It's this particular paragraph that I'm going to take issue with:

What does free advertising look like? It can take many forms: Getting a journalist or blogger to review a new mobile phone, placing a video on YouTube, spreading the word via bloggers, and starting a Facebook group dedicated to a brand or product.

All of those cost money.

Getting a journalist or blogger to review a product is not just something you come into work and throw together before you begin your real work. It's (or at least it should be) part of a larger campaign strategy for which goals and benchmarks have been clearly defined. Having worked on more than one product review campaign involving bloggers I can tell you to do them right they're both time and resource intensive.

Placing a video on YouTube is free, yes, but if the brand wants a slick branded channel that's going to cost some dollars in terms of design work. It's also not exactly as simple as upload and let it go. Someone needs to be in charge of managing the tags and keywords on the video and tracking its spread. With the millions of YouTube videos it also helps to do a little outreach to interested bloggers and writers with the link to the video to help spread the word and that costs money.

Which gets me to the "spread the word via bloggers." Not free. It's media relations, which companies have always paid for from their agencies and always will. If you pay an agency $500 for media outreach and that results in 20 mentions *from the people they contact* that comes to $25 per mention, but that billed time also should include vetting a media list and doing their research on the bloggers they're going to be contacting. If, as a result of those 20 initial hits, 10 other bloggers pick up the story the client's costs drop to about $17 per mention. But that's not free.

Finally, starting a Facebook group for the brand or product is, once again, not free. You can't just expect the page will automatically start attracting hundreds of fans that are just waiting for the brand to show up. Agencies need to research if there are existing fan-created pages and talk to them, they need to do outreach around the page and might even recommend doing some advertising to promote the page and drive membership. Plus, since this should be part of that larger online strategy, it's not great thinking to break this out from the overall cost of that campaign.

One of the great things about social media is that the tools that make up that category are indeed free or at least relatively low cost. But while the tools aren't going to cost very much out of pocket the implementation of those tools and the strategy around their usage does and always will. If you're doing it yourself and not using an agency or consultant it's still going to cost something, even if that's just your time and resources.

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Phreak 2.0 posted a photo:

With this pic I'm trying to win a Cinema 21:9 TV & worldwide fame!


more Info: Philips startet Twitterkampagne (thanks & via @nilsn)

What would happen if you tried to tweet the Mona Lisa? It's a question even Dan Brown has never dared to answer, but thanks to a very creative experiment from Mario Klingemann, now we know -- it turns Da Vinci's best known work into something Picasso would have loved.

Given Twitter's 140 character limit, it might seem next to impossible to recreate something as complex as the Mona Lisa. After all, 140 characters roughly translates to a mere 140 bytes of data, never mind the complexity of stuffing actual image data into text characters.

But the complexity of the task didn't fazed Klingemann, whose experimental image encoding technique translates the image into Chinese characters and spits out a version of the Mona Lisa that's reminiscent of a Cubist painting.

Klingemann is using Chinese characters because they allow him to send 210 bytes of data in only 140 UTF-8 characters -- perfect for cramming extra data into Twitter. When the text passes through the decoder the results are what's known as a Voronoi Diagram, a series of polygons used to convey the rough colors and shapes of the Mona Lisa.

Of course Twitter doesn't have the decoder, so no image would show up in your Twitter stream were you to post it. Instead you'd simply see the Chinese characters. But run the data through Klingemann's decoder and the result are what you see in the left-hand image above -- not exactly the Mona Lisa, but very impressive nonetheless.

If you're curious about the details of how Klingemann pulled it off, be sure to check out his very technical explanation on Flickr (and if you like what you see, have a look at some of his other "computational experiments").

So far Klingemann hasn't found any practical use for the experiment, which he says began as a competition to see if it would even be possible to send an image through Twitter. However, he plans to release the code behind the encoding and decoding process to the world to see what other curious Twitter experimenters can come up with.

See Also:

• Evolving Designs
• Processing Hits 1.0: Create Stunning Animations the Easy Way
• Killer Mashup Plots Your Schedule on a Google Map

Tweet von Google's Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik

[Via Social Media ROI]

Der Microblogging-Dienst Twitter ist hierzulande spätestens seit Barack Obamas Wahlkampf in den USA in aller Munde. Bei Twitter dreht sich alles um 140 Zeichen Botschaften, genannt Tweets, welche die individuelle Antwort des Users auf die Frage "What are you doing?" beinhalten.
Gesendet werden die Nachrichten an die "Follower" (= Friends) des Users. Wer bereits bei anderen Social Networks (Facebook, Xing, ATV.at) registriert ist, wird eine Ähnlichkeit zu deren Status Updates bzw. Mood Messages und dem Freunde/Kontakte-Netzwerk feststellen.

Neben der Kompaktheit von Twitter (es gibt nur eine Kernfunktion) punktet Twitter vor allen als Dialogmedium. In einer technisierten Welt wie unserer hilft Twitter so manche Kommunikations-Barrieren, z.B. zwischen Medium und Publikum:) aus dem Weg zu räumen.

So, und jetzt von der Theorie zur Praxis: Die ATV-Mitarbeiter machen schon fleißig Gebrauch von Twitter!
Neben dem von der ATV-Onlineredaktion betreuten Account @ATVbewegt gibt's noch mehr ATV-lastige Tweets unter! Allen voran HiSociety-BadBoy Dominic Heinzl! Hier die Liste:

twitter.com/dominicheinzl (Mr. HiSociety, ATV-Showreel)
twitter.com/alexmillecker (ATV Infochef)
twitter.com/sylviasaringer (ATV Anchor,  ATV-Showreel)

twitter.com/martinthuer (ATV Aktuell Reporter)
twitter.com/kunischk (Katharina Kunisch, ATV Aktuell Reporterin)
twitter.com/wobinido (Stephan Krammer, Onlineredaktion)
twitter.com/MerryMarian (Marian Kallinger, Multimedia Redakteur)

A compelling animated map visualization that focuses on revealing interesting data hidden in a social network information stream, here the travel information gathered from people's public Twitter streams by searching for the term 'Just landed in...'.

The idea is relatively simple: a Processing application finds those tweets that contain this particular phrase, parses out the mentioned location the people just landed in, along with the home location that has been listed on their Twitter profile. With this information, the individual travel itineraries are then mapped out as 3D curves placed on a flat world map.

Watch the video below, or read more relevant information at Jer Thorp's blog.

Mini Music reviews in only 140 characters. Hit or Miss?

http://twitter.com/tweetboxjury/

Twitter-Streetart von Questionmarc (via Urban Prankster) mit einem bemerkenswerten Kommentar darunter.

Das ist schon sehr, sehr lustig. Es ist ja nicht nur so, dass ein paar Journalisten Twitter nicht verstehen und darauf rumhacken. Es ist auch so, dass sobald man irgendetwas über Twitter schreibt, steht mindestens einmal der Kommentar „Dieses Posting ist der perfekte Beweis dafür, wie unglaublich belanglos und banal Twitter doch eigentlich ist." Jetzt könnte man sich ja denken, diese Twittmeckermentalität wäre ein deutsches Phänomen - da sah ich obige Streetart und darunter der Kommentar „This demonstrates perfectly just how stupid and pointless twitter is!" Von wegen deutsch, das ist schlicht ein mentales Filterproblem der Rezipienten. Wenn ich die Worte „Fashion" oder „Ballett" lese, dann lese ich gar nicht erst weiter und ich schreibe erst Recht nicht einen Kommentar wie „Dieses Posting ist der perfekte Beweis dafür, wie unglaublich belanglos und banal Ballett doch eigentlich ist."

Ich glaube, dieser Satz offenbart die komplette Absurdität solcher Kommentare. Geht auch so: „Dieses Posting ist der perfekte Beweis dafür, wie unglaublich belanglos und banal Blogs doch eigentlich sind." Bullshit. Ich kaufe mir auch keine Geflügelzüchtermagazine und beschwere mich dann, dass diese voller Geflügelzüchtercontent sind. Wenn man sich gerne und ausschließlich lange Abhandlungen zur Außenpolitik von Papua Neuguinea durchliest, wird man wohl schwerlich ein Fan von Twitter. Aber dann: Don't fucking read it!

Ansonsten empfehle ich immer noch Julies Anleitung zum Glücklichtwittern: Twitter ist unnütz.

[update] Von Jeriko grade in den Kommentaren gepostet, auch sehr schön:

it's a lesson in how the future of music is working -
fans are literally (and i mean that....literally) lining up at the signing table after shows and HANDING me cash, saying "thank you".

i had to EXPLAIN to the so-called "head of digital media" of roadrunner australia WHAT TWITTER WAS. and his brush-off that "it hasn't caught on here yet" was ABSURD because the next day i twittered that i was doing an impromptu gathering in a public park and 12 hours later, 150 underage fans - who couldn't attend the show - showed up to get their records signed.

no manager knew! i didn't even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park!
life is becoming awesome.

Social Collider is an interesting data visualization tool that reveals connections between conversations on Twitter. Sascha Pohflepp and Karsten Schmidt created the software, which can make the cultural spread of ideas visible.

Information Aesthetics explains how it works:

One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that did not resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

Information Aesthetics: "Social Collider: Revealing Connections between Twitter Conversations"

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and data visualization, Memes, Short Post, Twitter

Printed on the front of the shirt is a kind of bar-code that contains your Twitter user name. When an appropriate sensing device (phone, laptop) is pointed at it, your latest Twitter update will virtually appear. Watch this concept technology in action in the video below, and check out Squidder blog for more next level augmented reality experiments.

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo

[via comunicadores]

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Arts & Culture, Electronics & Gadgets, Fashion, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and augmented reality, Bar Code, QR Code, Squidder, T Shirt, Twitter