Birdhouse: A notepad for Twitter

Cameron.io — website of Mr. Cameron Kenley Hunt

Regarding Twitshirt

April 16 2009

Update: Twitshirt has updated their website with a new splash page. Great job on the quick turn-around, Airbag Industries. I applaud you.

Today a service launched, created by web-design outfit Airbag Industries, LLC, to print Twitter updates on shirts. It’s called Twitshirt. Great idea, and beautifully executed, but it operates without permission of Twitter users. They have a feature to opt-out if you don’t want your Twitter updates to appear on their t-shirts, but you can’t expect every Twitter user to be aware of Twitshirt and act to protect their intellectual property. It has to be opt-in.

From Twitter’s Terms of Service:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.

What you publish on Twitter is your intellectual property. This is not open to debate or subjectivity.

You retain copyright to everything you publish to Twitter. And automatically printing your intellectual property on a shirt for profit without permission, even if Twitshirt gives you a cut, is simply not legal in any way.

This isn’t about Twitshirt’s intentions; I’m positive they have only the best. They are very generous to share profits with Twitter users, and they seem like reasonable and decent people, but none of those things change copyright law.

You may think this is petty or insignificant, but as Neven Mrgan points out, if Twitter updates are valuable enough to sell on a $20 shirt, then they’re valuable enough to be protected under copyright.

Update: Just to be abundantly clear, I think they make a beautiful product. I’m simply disappointed that the online creative community, especially Airbag Industries, is embracing something that’s obviously using creative intellectual property without permission.

I know the online web-design community bands together whenever it’s most prominent figures are ripped-off, like when LogoMaid copied Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits logo, so what I see here is a double-standard. What makes one act of creative expression more important than another? Just because it’s short it’s OK to steal? Where do you draw the line? What about Tim Van Damme’s wonderful business card website? Is that OK to steal because it’s a short website?

Don’t deflect or brush this off just because you don’t consider it important. All creative work deserves to be protected, no matter how small.

Tumblr Adds Twitter Support February 05 2009

It’s primary offered as a way to cross-post from Tumblr to Twitter, but you can also use Tumblr as a nearly-full-featured Twitter client to view friends’ updates, direct messages, and replies. Not only that, they’ve devised a genius way to view @ reply chains. You can also choose to show Twitter posts mixed in with your Tumblr dashboard.

Developer of Crackulous Dishes It Out, but Can’t Take It February 02 2009

You can’t make this up:

I need people to support my work… I deserve appreciation.

Crackulous, if you haven’t heard, is an unofficial iPhone application (only installed via “jailbreaking”) and strips the DRM from any official App Store applications so you can essentially pirate software. He emailed Gizmodo asking for them to remove a link to a pirated copy of Crackulous.

Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov January 20 2009

The White House’s website was updated today after Obama was sworn in. It looks great, but here’s the best news, from the blog:

One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Palm Prē Video Tours January 09 2009

Looks interesting, certainly the first serious iPhone contender. A few notes, after watching these Gizmodo videos of the interface in action:

  • Redraw when scrolling looks better than iPhone, but not as responsive. In fact, the whole UI looks a measure less responsive than the iPhone, especially pinch in/out. I think Apple made the better trade-off.
  • The Prē’s browser is based on WebKit, like Android and the iPhone OS.
  • Palm’s new OS is called webOS because the SDK is HTML5 web applications with local storage capabilities.
  • Every window, web page, photo, and application is masked by huge rounded corners. I don’t know about you, but it would drive me insane.
  • Includes the Amazon Music Store. Smart move.

From the demos, it looks unfinished, but very promising. Remember the Palm Foleo? This is not the same Palm from two years ago.

Prettify January 06 2009

Garrett Murray:

I’ve been complaining recently on Twitter that there is no good place to find icons and wallpapers that appeal to my taste (read: very high quality design), so I started my own.

The Code That Broke the Zune December 31 2008

I’m sure by now you’ve heard every 30GB Zune stopped working today. Well, one member of a forum for Zune users supposedly found the offending code, which runs an if loop without stop if the current year has 366 days and the current day is number three hundred sixty six, like, for instance, today, December 31th, 2008.

Ironic that Microsoft’s Zune was broken due to an infinite loop.

UPDATE: You can see the full alleged source code on Pastie.

A Goal Worth Striving For December 03 2008

Marco Arment shares a wonderful bit of feedback from Instapaper user Aaron Lammer:

[T]hank you for creating something that encourages, rather than replaces, thought.

Wonderfully put. Great advice for anyone creating an application. Don’t treat your users like idiots. Let them be smart, and create something to help them be smart.

Michael Lopp said similar things on this subject about Dropbox. Although he describes this kind of software as “dumb”.