Clothing  is seen as an expression of one’s identity or as a symbol of the social group/culture one is belonging to, so why not wearing a smart, flex-image fabric that displays pieces of ones social network directly on clothes.

The OSMO Custom Social Network Wearable allows participants to customize clothing with smart, flex-image fabric.

The OSMO wearable is not only a wearable piece of your personal voice but it’s also connected, networked and alive. It communicates with your iPhone applications, detects “friends” from your Loopt™ profile and picks up and displays images from other participants in close proximity.

Source: Talk2myShirt, Creating Space

This week I came across two great examples that perfectly match with the title of this blog: Social Textiles! They combine social media with clothes; more in particular with T-shirts!

Firstly there is the Facebook application, Status king which makes it possible to order T-shirts with  some basic Facebook information about yourself printed on: more in particular your Facebook status, user picture and how long ago you’ve updated your status. So if you want to let  know “what are you doing right now?” in a non-digital way!

But if you say: I’m not so a Facebook-fan. I’m more into Twitter, than I have some very good news for you! Similar to the Facebook application there is a service, called TWitoShirt which displays your tweets on a shirt, exactly as it appears on the web; so not only the message is printed, but also the username, user picture and the time that has elapsed. An additional feature is that you can also customize the size and colours.

Source: Mashable, Status king, TWitoShirt

Via Robin Hamman, blogging at Cybersoc, I found a great presentation on the use of Twitter called “How Twitter changed my life” (by Minxuan Lee).

Most interesting elements of the presentation are:

* The 5 stages of Twitter acceptance (Denial - Presence - Dumping - Conversing - Microblogging)

* The fact that it’s not about the question “What are you doing?”, but about “What has your attention?”

* About the open API: “For every pain you face, there is a Twitter app. Otherwise, create it!”

via: Cybersoc

The immenseley popular Social Media tool Twitter was founded in March 2006 by Evan Williams (@ev), Biz Stone (@Biz) and Jack Dorsey (@jack) who all worked at the podcasting company Odeo. The initial idea of Twitter however, started already in 2000 and came from a frustration from Jack Dorsey who was quite active at LiveJournal but wanted to create an even more ‘live’ journal: “Real-time, up-to-date, from the road.” He tried to slip the idea of live status updates into each project he was working on, but it was only at a daylong brainstorm at Odeo that he found the right people to start Twitter.

First Sketch of Twitter by Jack Dorsey

Twitter used to call Twttr - Mind the green logo.

As Odeo needed to lay off a few of the founding fathers of Twitter a new home for this instant status update-service was needed. Obvious was born and it had the sole purpose of being the incubator for Twitter (in April 2007 Twitter got its own company -Twitter inc- with Jack Dorsey as a CEO). For a long while Twitter stayed in private beta and had the opportunity to grow in close contact with (and thus with a lot of feedback from) a small number of first user and enthusiasts. Now, Twitter seems to be the new popular kid on the social media block as it has by one measure over 3 million accounts and, by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008, a fivefold increase in a month (source: wikipedia).

Trivia:

• There were no whales, nor birds in the beginning. The initial mascot was an indian (asian?) girl
• One of the initial team members Dom Sagolla is working on a book called “140 Characters
  A literary guide for terse content”
• The initial Twitter (or should I say twttr) colour was green
• The short code to send your message to the Twitter service was “89887″ (which reads TWTTR on the numeric pad of your cell phone). It was later changed to 40404 as this was much easier to remember
• The initial Twitter question to trigger action was not “What are you doing?” but the more informal “what are you up to?”

Indian (asian?) girl - the first mascot of Twitter

You’re on Twitter? Cool! I’m on Twitter too…

via: Wikipedia - 140 characters - Flickr

Social media play an important role in sharing experiences, thoughts, feelings … During Obama’s Inauguration Day a lot of people used social media to get/stay connected with others and thus being part of that historical day. Some numbers:

During Obama’s inauguration Twitter reported five times more tweets.

But also on YouTube, this week only 332 000 new videos  containing the tag “Obama” were uploaded and 17 000 with the tag “Inauguration”.`

The full report can be found on Mashable

Katrien already wrote on the perils of using Facebook. I now found an interesting work on using Facebook for activism. On the site of DigiActive, a volunteer organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists around the world use the Internet and mobile phones to increase their impact, you can find “Introduction to Facebook Activism” written by Dan Schultz.

Because of its massive user base and the free applications one can create and install Facebook is too interesting to ignore. This small guide (its only 15 pages long) contains some pro & cons of Facebook activism, a practical guide for setting up activists events and three examples of Facebookactivism: Monk’s protst in Burma, Help Fouad Campaign from Morocco and the Free Kareem Campaign from Egypt.

The most interesting content is off course the analysis of these three different campaigns as it gives an insight on how a sometimes spontaneous action evolves into a massivley supported cause on Facebook and what problems and questions could then pop up (for example, the lack of anonimity in these sometimes dangerous campaigns).

Download Introduction to Facebook Activism (pdf)

Source: DigiActive