When more money enters a market where the amount of existing products remains limited the result is price inflation. I think a similar phenomenon exists in Twitter that I’d call Twitter Inflation or Twinflation (the latter being the cutified version of the term).

This concept was hit on (sort of) at Media Shift in an article called Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg, which discusses managing a steadily growing list of Twitter followers. What I’m talking about is a bit more central to the basic concept of Twitter.

I think there’s a natural rate of inflation to Twitter follower counts, just like there’s a natural rate of inflation in an economy. A trend line, if you will, that can be expected to generally increase over time similar to the way worker productivity and compound interest naturally expand an economy. The reason is simply because as more and more Twitter users arrive and add new Twitter friends they steadily push up the follower count for those already using the service.

I think it would be interesting to look through the data at a site like Twitter Counter to see if there’s a determinable average rate of inflation in Twitter based on the growth rates of a large sample of users.

If this reads as slap-forehead obvious, I apologize. I have a hard time determining when something is less profound then pedestrian and vice versa.

I downloaded the Tweetie for Mac client this week. I didn’t know much about it except that I kept hearing about it from a bunch of different twitterers.

It’s a great application with a lot of potential. I love the use of core animation when you switch between the side bar settings, and I think the interface is intuitive and easy to use.

4 Things I’d like to see in the first update

1. A window to tweet right from the interface

Seriously…I have to ask for this?

2. Turn off notifications for multiple Accounts

Let’s say, hypothetically, I managed more then one twitter account (which everyone knows I do not). The reason that I don’t use Tweetdeck is because so many of my lists were parallel lists. I don’t need to read tweets from one account and then read the same tweets in another account. I would like the option of turning the blue “new tweet” notification off for individual accounts instead of globally across all accounts. (For all I know, this is actually possible because there is a setting for this in Preferences, but it didn’t look account specific so I didn’t mess with it).

3. I hate dock icons

(The “3.” in my graphic was as close as I could get without spending the time to create a downward arrow). I hate dock icons, especially when the application falls into the “Menu Bar” category. (Last.fm, Evernote, Growl, Dropbox, etc.). Tweetie clearly falls into this category, and a menu bar icon is there by default. Most applications allow the user the option of turning off the dock icon if they choose as well. I don’t need it. It’s extraneous, and more to the point: it bothers me. Do I speak for every user, clearly no. That’s why I should have a quick yes or no to turn it on or off based on preference. Problem solved.

4. A way to save tweet drafts

You know…for people who put way to much time into crafting the perfect set of 140 characters. (Or less if you’re trying to encourage people to retweet you).

…and a Late Addition:

Since @replies automatically show up in my twitter stream, why can’t the new replies indicator turn off at the same time as the new tweet indicator? I see the value of collecting the @replies in one place, but if they’ve been read in one place they should be marked as read globally.

Quick. Without looking: what does the bird look like on the Twitter homepage?

(No, we haven’t been through this before.)

Okay…so you’re picturing the bird on Twitter’s homepage in your head. Does it look like either of these birds?

If you answered “yes,” you’re incorrect. Go check out twitter.com and take a look. I’ll wait.

…

I bring it up because the bird that actually holds court on twitter.com is the subject of this interesting article on crowdsourcing from Wired.com. Crowdsourcing as it relates to Graphic Design is the process of farming out design work to potentially hundreds of designers then giving the client the option of paying for the design they like best. If you “win” you get paid. If you don’t get selected you get bupkis. As you can probably predict, crowdsourcing is extremely popular in the Graphic Design community. The only problem with the Wired story about crowdsourcing is that the bird graphic on the homepage of Twitter.com isn’t an example of crowdsourcing.

The bird you see on the homepage (and to be fair, this is clearly discussed in the article), is from iStockphoto.com. iStock is a place for average, everyday designers and photographers to post whatever stock imagery and illustrations that they want in the hopes that someone will buy them for royalty free use. Submitting imagery to the site is entirely voluntary and the barrier to entry is low, meaning that the market is crowded and the competition is fierce.

Frankly: “Tough shit.”

If your work is valuable it will rise to the top, just like it does in any true market. If you suck, you suck. No one will buy your stuff and you’ll limp home battered and tear-stained. iStock is insanely competitive and insanely cheap compared to Corbis.com and other stock photography licensing sites in the market, but what it clearly is not is crowdsourcing.

If iStock functioned like a crowdsourcing service it would have users describe the photograph or illustration that they have in mind and indicate the price that they are willing to pay for it. Then, budding young photographers looking for some side money or for their big break, (and, presumably, lacking the foresight to realize that they are shortchanging themselves), will go out and try to take that specific shot. The site user would then select the shot that they want and pay only that photographer/illustrator the agreed upon fee.

Twitter did not contact iStock photo and say “we need a picture of a white bird on a brown branch with curliques at the end, we’re willing to pay $6. Go!” What they did was visit a royalty free stock imagery site and purchase the rights to use one of the files completely in accordance with the terms of use and the expectations of the original designer.

There are, literally, hundreds of thousands of websites out there that use imagery found at iStock because it is a cheap, easy and convenient alternative to premium sites that charge hundreds of dollars and put all sorts of restrictions on the use of their imagery. If you spend any notable time perusing the iStock catalog you start to see their images flash up all over the internet. That’s actually the market limitation on iStock: you can get a great image there super cheap, but you can’t restrict its use unless you pay a fair price to do so, meaning you always run the risk of seeing “your” image used elsewhere, but i digress…

In conclusion (somewhere, my high school english teacher just experienced an involuntary eye twitch), the crowdsourcing debate will continue to rage, but this is not a good field on which to have the battle. Twitter licensed a stock image. That’s it.

-oAk-

A quiz

One of these is the Twitter Bird. The other is not. Do you know which one?

The bird on the left actually belongs to Twitter. It shows up on twitter.com from time to time, most notably when you try to hit a profile page that doesn’t exist:

The bird on the right has nothing, officially to do with Twitter. It’s the copyrighted logo/icon for The Icon Factory’s application Twitterific. In fact, the Icon Factory, officially does not allow the use of their bird icon if it’s being used to represent Twitter, (a fact I learned from Charles Strickland’s blog post “Stop Using the Twitterific Icon!)” Officially condemned or not, using the Icon Factory’s mark to promote Twitter is becoming a trend one runs into frequently. Here’s an example:

Now…am I picking on Noupe? Nope. Just to prove that I am an amiable sort, I’ll admit that I made the exact same mistake last summer in my (as yet undeveloped) Tweetionary design:

Why did I do this? Simple: I didn’t know any better.

Unfortunately, for The Icon Factory, they have created a truly…well…iconic icon. The Twitterific bird is arguably more recognizable then any of the marks officially in use by Twitter. (As far as I know, the bubbly, light blue “Twitter” letter mark at the top of the “page doesn’t exist” image is the official Twitter logo, although i would argue that the Fail Whale is more recognizable). The Twitterific bird looks like the strong brand icon of an internet phenomenon like Twitter… especially if you don’t think to do the research.

Weak branding by Twitter encourages bloggers and site owners to come up with their own branding to promote their Twitter streams. The result is hundreds of different interpretations of a blue cartoon bird. Each one of those instances of a user created Twitter brand is a waste opportunity for Twitter to manufacture a consistent brand identity.

The Design Superhero (an extremely hot site that I just found through the magic of google), actually has compiled some of the myriad ways people represent twitter on their sites. (seriously…click on that link. I’ll wait…  …  …you back? How hot was that site design?!)

You can’t really blame the Icon Factory, can you? Making strong marks and icons is what they do. The real question is, why hasn’t Twitter established a more cohesive branding strategy with better, more recognizable marks? They have a network of downright evangelical users who want to promote their brand for them for free. All they need to do is come up with a strong brand identity, and make it really easy to syndicate that identity across tens of thousands of user websites.

At the very least, as web designers we can be aware that Twitterific and the Icon Factory probably shouldn’t be asked to do Twitter’s branding work for them, and stop using their bird to represent anything but Twitterific.

-oAk-

For those of you who are familiar with this post, or for those of you currently employed at L’Universitie du Notre Dame du Lac and inhabit office space in Grace Hall:

The Powers-That-Be at Cafe DeGrasta have agreed to give this “twitter thing” a whirl…just as soon as the students leave for Christmas and she has the time to concentrate. Putting aside for a moment, the fact that she is giving Twitter’s inherent complexity waaaaay to much credit, I am gratified that they’ve agreed to take this small, hesitating first step into the 21st century. 

Watch this space.