Saturday, October 10, 2009

Twaxed.com Feature

We don’t care that you are "having a busy Monday," you just "ate a meatball sandwich for dinner," or you "dropped the soap in the shower three times this morning." And we really, really don’t care which “Sex in City” character you most resemble.

Here's where we all went wrong: We took our friendships online. First we began communicating more by email than by phone. Then we switched to instant messaging and texting. Now, we "friend" each other on Facebook, and communicate by "tweeting" our thoughts—in 140 characters or less—via Twitter. We humiliate ourselves by sharing regrettable, often embarrassing text messages late at night while drunk. Until finally, we realize that we have shared way too much, say FML, and tell the world about it.

All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline.

But there's a danger here, too. If we're not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships and our most powerful tool: communication.

“We’re not communicating and using the words we’ve been given in a constructive and effective way,” Tyrone Schiff, creator of Twaxed.com, said. “We must use our words wisely.”

In August, Schiff launched the new social media entertainment site Twaxed.com. Here ridiculous, inappropriate or simply entertaining tweets are showcased. In addition, users have the opportunity to vote on the tweet by selecting “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”; one may also comment on particularly amusing posts.

The idea for Twaxed came about last summer while 22-year-old Schiff was working in Ann Arbor after graduating from the University of Michigan in May. Behind a graffiti-covered door, at the end of the alley next to the Michigan Theater and one floor below street level, a handful of entrepreneurs brainstormed in the TechArb. With 18-foot ceilings and no natural light, the room glooms from the hubbub of Liberty Street, just one story up. Google opened up the space over the summer and invited intelligent computer programmers and entrepreneurs to focus on building their businesses.

“When you put those two groups [programmers and budding entrepreneurs] together you just make a lot of stuff,” Schiff said. “It’s the kind of place where you just show up if you want to do something cool with your life.”

It was early August 2009 when one of Schiff’s friends sat hunched in front of his computer, astounded. He had just posted something on Twitter, and within minutes, had dozens of people following him. Then he offered the words that inspired Schiff: “You just have to beware what you share.”

“Out of that instance, I wondered, are we really thinking about what we’re saying?” Schiff said. “Because when you say something today it’s out there, in the open, and people can and will see it.”

But let's face it; the problem is much greater than which tools we use to communicate. It's what we are actually saying that's really mucking up our relationships and our communication skills.
By creating Twaxed.com, Schiff hopes to show the world that amidst all this heightened chatter, we're not saying much that's interesting. “The only way we can become a better society is to reexamine what we’re doing,” Schiff said.

With the tagline, “Beware what you share, you will get Twaxed” Schiff hopes that the website will not only entertain, but also inspire people to be more profound and more prudent with what they share online.

“I don’t even use twitter,” Schiff said. “I find it quite strange.”
For instance, a recent Twaxed post by CharliDDS reads, “Every time I write "thesaurus" I imagine the best dinosaur ever. THEsaurus.” The hope is that Charli will find herself on Twaxed, realize how absurd her comments are, and think twice before typing her next tweet.

And it’s working. Since Twaxed launched in August, the website has grown by 4,000 percent and is averaging 2,500 visitors a day. Schiff hopes to see that number rise to 10,000 visitors by the end of October.

“I don’t think Twaxed will ever be as large as Facebook,” Schiff said. “But my goal is to hit half a million visitors a day and I think that can be achieved.”

Twitter projects to have 18 million users by the end of 2009. And in the next sixth months, Schiff hopes that Twaxed will have reached 25 percent of those users. While Twaxed has no revenue stream yet, the goal is that it will be a “freemium” that is advertising and merchandise-based.

“The future is unknown so I might as well see what happens,” Schiff said. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll just create something else.”


This story was produced by Lauren Rosenblum, senior at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

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.