Spread Christmas Cheer With an Animated Twitter Avatar

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

While searching through various profiles on Twitter lately, I realized a select few had realized a small secret with Twitter. In browsing those profiles, Twitterati such as @ijustine and others I noticed had animated profile pictures, some even larger than the default 100x100 pixel standard profile avatar we're used to seeing. The animated profile pictures were a unique way to make their profiles stand out amongst the many other profiles I was reading amongst my friends list on Twitter. They were also a great way to spread the Christmas cheer.

I decided to try this on my own, and was unsuccessful on my first try. It appeared as though these profiles were either a fluke, taking advantage of a previous flaw in Twitter's profile image upload process that no longer worked, or they were clue on a secret I wasn't aware of. Then I came across this post on Twitter's GetSatisfaction page and I realized I was just not trying hard enough.

How to Create Your Own Winter Snowfall Profile Picture

Here's how I made mine. Creating the image takes a little PhotoShop knowledge, or you can just do a search and steal your own graphic from elsewhere on the Web. This is the best way I know how to do it - please share if you know better! Here's how to roll your own in PhotoShop - this was all done on a Mac in CS4:

1. Download the Snowfall PSD - I found these files of animated snowfall you can load right into PhotoShop. Decompress the file, then open one of them in PhotoShop, and now we need to get your profile picture behind the snow.
2. Click File->Open, and select your profile image to have in the background. It will open in a new tab or window within PhotoShop. Choose your little arrow selector (I'm not a PhotoShop expert - I'm not sure the "official" name for this), and drag, then drop your image into the main Snowfall PSD window you originally opened. It should create a new layer with your profile image in it (if not, create one, and re-apply the image to that layer). Now, resize your image to fit the existing canvas.
3. You should see a window with a list of frames for the animated graphic. If not you'll need to enable that window (we won't cover that here). With the new layer and your profile image, you'll need to delete the extra starting frame with that profile image. Once deleted, select the new first frame, then make sure the background image frame is shown (the little "eye" should be selected), and the first layer should be the only one displayed (again, with the little "eye").
4. Take your little magic wand selector, and click in the black background. The snowflakes should all be selected.
   Now hit your "delete" button. (Again, be sure the layer 1 is selected, or you'll get the wrong snowflakes selected) You should now see the first frame's snowflakes in front of your profile picture.
5. Now, select the second frame, and then ensure your profile image background, and second layer is showing, and the first layer is turned off. Repeat step 4, and you'll see the second frame with your profile image background and second frame snowflakes in front of it.
6. Repeat for the remaining frames and layers.
7. Now, click "File", and "Save for Web and Devices", choose to export as the preset "GIF 128 No Dither". Then, in the colors' dropdown select 256 (so we get the full spectrum). Click Save, and then save to a file you can remember. You've now got your animated gif!

Saving the File to Twitter

This is actually the tricky part. Unless Twitter fixes their upload process (which in that case perhaps it won't even be possible to do this, or else it will be much easier, depending on what they decide their policy to be), it won't work on your first try. For some, it could take up to 30 tries, so be patient, but your patience will be rewarded, I promise!

The first thing to do is go to http://twitter.com/account/picture, and delete your current profile picture by clicking "delete current". I found that even this takes several tries to get working, so if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Once deleted, you'll need to start the process of selecting the file from your computer (by clicking "browse"), then uploading the file to Twitter (by clicking "save"). You should see a "That's a nice picture!" message after you hit save and it is uploaded.

If successful, your new animated picture should display next to the browse box, and you need to do nothing else. However, you will probably not see that your first try, and even some times you'll get a "Twitter is over capacity" message. Ignore those, hit back, and restart the process of browsing to select your picture, then hitting save again, and again (again, it could take over 30 times!), until you see your animated gif appear.

Soon you'll have a beautiful animated Christmas gif like mine. You can check mine out on my profile - create your own and share it with us in the comments!

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

This Christmas Eve, Go Internet Easter Egg Hunting

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

In lieu of repeatedly wishing everyone on the Internet a Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays/Merry Kwanzaa, I have a special gift: Internet Easter Eggs. So Merry-Happy whatever you celebrate and enjoy!

makeuseof.com's Google's Top 10 Hidden Treasures


My favorite: Search Google for Once in Blue Moon
hehe2.net's 10 Cool Open Source Easter Eggs


My favorite: Ubuntu's ASCII cow
home.comecast's XP Secrets


My favorite: MS Paint's Image trails.
CNET News: "10 awesome Internet Easter eggs"


My favorite: Yahoo's Singing Yokel
TechRadar also has a massive post on Easter Eggs covering software, hardware, applications, and games here.

On a related note, FriendFeed is another great resource. Not Easter Eggs, but there are two very active rooms with heaps of useful information. The App Room is one of my favorites, where users share news, reviews, questions, and of course apps here. The Goodie Room has tips, tricks, shortcuts, hacks, and How-Tos. My favorites are Google / Gmail tricks here.

So whether you're single and have no family (like me), snowed in, avoiding the holiday crowds, agoraphobic, a Grinch, or you're just addicted to the Internet, these links should keep you preoccupied for the next few days.

Happy Holidays, everyone. :)

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Kakuteru - Roll Your Own FriendFeed On Your Own Site

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Lifestreaming was a big thing for social media in 2008, and surely will be even bigger in 2009. Thanks to sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and others, we can easily aggregate our social activities into one central place. As with all of these services, we must log into the service's Web site to see and stream our activity. That is fine for the majority of us, but what about self-hosted lifestreaming? Solutions include Sweetcron and a ton of advanced PHP scripts that can be found at the lifestreamblog.

The problem, however, is that a lot of these scripts are complicated, and if you do not have basic PHP coding skills, you are pretty much out of luck. This is where Kakuteru comes into play. Kakuteru is an open source lifestreaming application built on Ruby On Rails, with the key difference being that it uses your your FriendFeed.com stream as the core lifestream backend. It falls into the self-hosted lifestreaming category because you have the ability to mask your Kakuteru service URL to a domain name, as I did for testing purposes. It's completely customizable as well.

Wait a second. This looks a lot like Sweetcron!

Dominiek ter Heide, the creator of Kakuteru, got his inspiration and design from sweetcron, but that's where the similarities end. Sweetcron is completely self hosted, being you must install and upload the files to your Web server. Sweetcron also runs on PHP, and gives you the ability to import any type of activity stream via an RSS feed. Lastly, Sweetcron stores all of your content on your server.

Kakuteru, on the other hand, is Web-based, and only aggregates your FriendFeed activity for your lifestream backend. In other words, you need a FriendFeed account for this to work properly. You have the ability to strictly post HTML content, if you decided not to aggregate any of your FriendFeed services. You also have the ability to toggle on and off the FriendFeed services you want to lifestream, so if you wanted your Kakuteru lifestream to strictly display Google Reader shares and Youtube videos, you would be able to do so.

Okay, so what's so special about this?

• The ability to import your FriendFeed stream to a custom domain name with full customization
• Semantic features such as autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.com
• Related articles & tweets are shown for each entry.
• Blog posts can be written and posted using textile, markdown or HTML.

Kakuteru uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates, and published articles have the ability to display Tweet-this, Digg and also Addthis.com, if you choose to enable these social components. "Me on other sites" are automatically gathered from your Friendfeed account.

Oh, and did I mention it's open source?

Out of the box:


It's very vanilla out of the box, as you can see in the screenshot above, or by going to mikefruchter.com. Give your stream a custom feel and fit by customizing your CSS, headers and about page. Select the services you want to display, by default it will stream all of your FriendFeed services. Be sure to add your domain name and follow the instructions for pointing your dns to your Kakuteru account.



Extra integration:

Kakuteru allows you to seeminglessly incorporate Web 2.0 features and functions, such as your own custom Disqus forum, Feedburner feed, Dopplr schedule and social bookmarking services. No editing of code is necessary, it's a simple plug and play process.


Activity stats:

One of the features I particularly like is the activity stats. Kakuteru gives you two sets of stats. Daily activity, services used and hoURLy activity. Who doesn't love colorful bar graphs?

Final verdict:

I'm particularly not too big on self-hosted lifestreams, as I prefer the real deal with the community interaction behind it, i.e. FriendFeed. If I was looking for a custom solution, I would use this, but it's currently limited to only your FriendFeed data. If you are not on FriendFeed, this application will be of little use to you other than creating a bare-bones HTML blog post. I do like that it is semantically-driven and offers a ton of bells and whistles, and like Sweetcron, it's open source. This application showcases a lot of what Sweetcron is currently lacking, the creator has put some thought and time into it and it's obvious by looking at the feature set. Since the creator of this app took his que from Sweetcron, I would like to see this application be able to save your lifestreaming data to your server. Offer that, and you have a real winner on your hands.

Kakuteru is currently in closed Beta, so be sure to register as a second round of invites will be going out soon.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

The Mobile Revolution Has Arrived

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Some people have been waiting for the mobile Web to arrive for years. The one mobile developer blog I have read over the years has been Russell Beattie.

Disappointingly, he gave up his dream of the mobile Web back in April of this year. This is disappointing for a few reasons. First, you always hate to see an entrepreneur quit. Second, Russell is a smart guy who has been hyping the mobile Web for years, but has just been too early for most people. Lastly, I think if he and his company were able to wait another year, there might have been hope.

Why would another year have made a difference? Well, it is the convergence of a few things. iPhone 3G was released with much hype this year. BlackBerry is finally making a move in the consumer space as well. The Curve has been a great device, but they are trying to compete directly with the iPhone with their new Storm. Google, Android and TMobile are also making an attempt to compete with the G1. All of these devices, but to a lesser extent with the Curve, are large screened, full browser, consumer oriented devices. Gone are the days of the "ooh, look how pretty the RAZR is".

Daniel Pritchett wrote on LouisGray.com about the changes that are coming as well:

The continued market growth of iPhones, Netbooks, Blackberries and other tools make mobile browser support more and more important. Here’s a quick thought experiment for you: If you’re running site analytics, look and see how many of your viewers run a resolution lower than 800x600. Nearly 6% of all visitors to this site are using these low-resolution devices. Most of them are using the 320x396 screen of the iPhone and iPod touch family.

In addition to the general usability of the new mobile browsers and screen size, the application stores put a centralized location to find new applications. This is a big change that was started by the iPhone, and it is a fantastic change. Blackberry and the Android based phones have also opened application stores in order to compete effectively. This has created a real economy for mobile applications, and is something that Mr. Beattie would have loved. Of course, the applications only fit on these phones because of the expanded memory. The iPhone 3G comes in 8GB and 16GB sizes. The Blackberry phones are typically shipped with 2GB, but accept removable storage in the form of microSD cards.

Of course, these advances in speed and memory allow us to use the phones as an mp3 player, or even to play streaming audio and video. This was not even remotely possible a few years ago. The network speeds were not available for streaming anything. Finally, the phones have dropped in price far enough that normal people can buy them. You no longer have to be a high ranking corporate employee to get a good Blackberry. Both the iPhone and the Blackberry phones have models at $200 with a service contract.

Why does all of this matter now? We could play music on our phones a few years ago. Blackberry has had email integration for several years as well. However, the convergence of all these things has only recently happened at a reasonable price point. Normal people, not just gadget geeks and early adopters, are finally getting comfortable with using their phone for more than phone calls. As an example, my wife inherited my Blackberry Curve. I just purchased it this summer, and a month later received a new Curve from my employer. So, my wife now has a Blackberry and is slowly getting addicted to it. She can now check email on a page that looks something like the internet version of her email. She loves the full keyboard for text messaging. She syncs the phone with Outlook every day to ensure that she has her contacts and calendar in both places. Could she do this with her 2 year old Motorola or Nokia phone? No, not really. Her old phone could barely play a ringtone that sounded like music.

That reminds me, I have to load her Curve with some music. She has been bugging me for days about that. Yep, you can do that now.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.