Sunday Comics for the 21st Century

I've been a little sidetracked at the moment with another project, Twaxed.com. It has unfortunately kept me pretty occupied and I haven't had that much opportunity to think of many other things outside of the realm of Twaxed.com. This new endeavor is going well though. Each day it gets larger.

The concept of the website is to aggregate the most ridiculous, inappropriate, and overall entertaining tweets on one site where users can vote and comment on the fresh material. So, I've been devoting a lot of my time and creative resources to establishing it over the past two months. It has been well worth it and I look forward to see how it grows in the next couple of months.

Anyway, lets talk about the idea I want to share with you today. Similar in scope to Twaxed.com, it uses a "Twitter-esque" framework in order to achieve its outcomes. I'll say that one of my biggest gripes with Twitter is that the service itself is pretty useless. I don't mean this negatively, but the actual entity itself does not do anything that has not been done before.

Surely, some can extrapolate that Twitter aggregates the wisdom of the commons into "Trending topics" and this is like a real-time expression of what is going on in the world. Sure. That is a pretty neat feature. Others will say that it has revolutionized communication. And I think that it has and will continue to do so.

But, ultimately, Twitter doesn't really do anything. It provides users with a platform to communicate what is on their minds in real-time with people who want to hear what they have to say, also known as followers. In essence, I view Twitter as a mass text message to all the people in your life that you want to connect with on this service.

That is wonderful and all, but it just sounds like a lot of words to me. And it is. There are so many words. In 140 characters, people convey their deepest desires, funny stories, or news from around the world. But, ultimately, its just a bunch of words and that isn't really doing anything constructive.

Twitter is cool because it has started to branch out and there are several other ways outside of a web interface in which you can send messages through the Twitter service (great TechCrunch Article on Twitter). I think that is a feature that makes Twitter remarkable. It is so open that every sort of communication device, whether it be phone, web, or whatever, can be funneled into the Twitter service, which essentially just aggregates all of these words (which I contend is rather meaningless).

However, I think there is a tremendous amount of meaning and use that can be driven from the Twitter service. Take Twaxed.com for instance. Using some of Twitter's funniest tweets, one can create an internet property that is a source of social media entertainment. That's actually doing something...not a whole bunch of words.

Twitter has an infinite number of applications as I see it. I think if you want to try and draw an analogy, a great place to start would be with Facebook applications. When Facebook allowed people to start developing applications for their service, thousands of things popped up. I think to a large degree, Twitter is going through that same process right now.

My primary thought process in regards to Twitter at the moment is, "how can I utilize 140 characters of text in creative ways?"

Thinking this thought is uniquely human and it has probably occurred to a lot of you as well. Let me explain what I'm suggesting a little further. Humans possess the wonderful capacity to do what is called generative computation. This means that we can create limitless varieties of expressions. Generative computation can be broken down into two types. There is recursive and combinatorial computation. The question that drives me to think about how to create meaning for the Twitter service (which I perceive to lack meaning) is due to recursion.

Recursion is the repeated use of a rule to create new expressions. Therefore, I am essentially using Twitter, which I feel houses units of 140 character comments, in a variety of different expressive ways. I truly believe that the applications are limitless, because the Internet and language are both limitless, and when you combine them, you get limitless squared (wow). If you would like to read more about generative computation and recursion, check out the September 2009 edition of Scientific American - Origin of the Mind article.

Anyway, I hope you explore the possibilities of what may become of Twitter in the future. I know that beyond communication, there are so many really fun and cool ways we can use 140 characters of text.

I'm going to give you one example here now. It is based on a Quirky.com model. Quirky is a really awesome website that creates products based on open-source development. Everything is created by users. Ideas for products are submit to the site, people vote on which they like most, then a logo is designed by users, voted on by users, a tag line is developed, voted on by users, etc., etc. The entire concept is the result of pretty effective market research. With a model like that you pretty much couldn't create a bad product. So, Quirky.com is brilliant, so why not apply its model to a Twitter application model.

Another really good reason to use a Quirky.com model is based on this TED lecture by Dan Pink on the evolution of motivation:

Okay, so now that we have a model (Quirky.com) and pretty solid rationale behind why we ought to build a service in this fashion, what can we possibly do with 140 characters that can be easily submitted from anywhere in the world on any device you can think of?

How about make a comic? (Hence the title of this blog post, comics for the 21st century)

I love comics. I think they're funny, and the only reason I'm happy to get the paper on Sundays anymore is so that I can strip away the colorful comic section and read them and giggle to myself. I imagine there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there who like comics too, and if it were as easy as I'm about to make it, would try contribute to making it.

Comics are beautifully simple. They are made up of a couple of still frames that are drawn together, and contain a small amount of usually witty text that is able to convey the meaning. If I were to guess, I'd imagine that most of the speech bubbles that one would find in a typical section of the Sunday newspaper comic section contain around or less than 140 characters of text each.

Isn't that a wonderful coincidence?

So. We can use Twitter to create open source comics. Here is how the design works and I'll get into a little more detail about how it all comes together.

At the beginning of the week, lets say, Monday, a website opens itself up to (1) submissions of comics. The comics are between 3 and 5 panels each, and contain no words. They have speech bubbles in place where text can go, but otherwise, they are just drawings made by artists.

Wait? Artists? I think one of the wonderful things about creating Twitter applications is that it can bring together people who have various talents, and we should also work on harnessing talents of individuals in the information age by giving them specific assignments that they are proficient at.

So, in this case you are bringing together artists with people who can write witty snippets of funny text. I think that makes the world a happier and smaller place for people, and heck, we might as well be happy.

So, artists submit their comics and they are voted on by the users of the website. This voting process can probably go on for about 3 days. Ultimately, one of the comics per week will be selected. Cool. So now we have a comic for the week. I don't know how people will determine which comic to use, but I think that's what makes it fun.

Okay, so now that we have the comic, we have to (2) insert text into those speech bubbles in order to make this comic really really funny. Over the next 3 days, open the comic up to people on Twitter. Do it one panel at a time or the whole thing at once. For instance, you could have people fill in the first panel of the comic, and then off of that information, create the text for the second speech panel.

Or you could allow people to come up with entire strings of funny text that would go throughout the comic. These are issues that can be dealt with later, but are pretty interesting to resolve.

So, now, you just get people to vote on the funniest. Every Sunday, you can publish a open-source comic that was made by artists and Twitters.

And why would people do something like this? As the Ted.com video suggests, its because we're motivated by something deeper than money when there is ambiguity and cognitive thought involved in any situation. Also, I think that the website could easily pay the people who have their artwork and text selected (stemming from the Quirky.com framework).

For an aspiring artist, this would be tremendous exposure. For a comic writer, it would have a similar impact on their career, and I think that a site like this could easily generate $50-$500 of revenue for each of the people who make the contribution to the final version of the comic.

And there, you have it, a Sunday comic for the 21st century.