Pa++ern is an esoteric language developped by the Japanese duo Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi. The main idea is that one can create custom embroidered t-shirts using Twitter as the control interface.
The program uses sets of one character commands that instruct a sewing machine to excecute specific designs. Users can input these command codes via the Twitter micro-blogging service (@_pt), and view their results on the Pa++ern website.

Source: PSFK, Pa++ern

A few weeks ago there was quite some uproar on the change in the Terms of Services from Facebook.

Amanda French compares the TOS of Facebook with the one of MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Linkedin seems to have quite a strong Terms of Service-statement: in fact, when you upload something (photos, ideas, your profile,…) you grant them the “right [...] to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.”

Twitter seems to have the most “user-friendly” TOS:

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

If you are still in doubt whether you can trust “those social media”-sites, then maybe it’s a good idea to consider open source social networking.

Inshoshi calls itself a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product! Inshoshi tries to build the code to be able to “install” and further develop your own social networking site.

LovedByLess is a similar project and seems to be finished already. Both seem to be good tools to work third party-independent.

Today, I stumbled upon a post from PSFK that grabbed my attention. At Squidder, they apparently love augmented reality and besides an nice experiment with a car, they made an augmented reality Twitter feed shirt.

On the front of the shirt, a pattern – containing a Twitter username – is printed. When the pattern is detected by computer or phone, the Twitter feed from the corresponding Twitter user (embedded in the pattern) is displayed!

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo.

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