Have a Custom Twitter Background? Keep an Eye on the New Changes

My RSS feed this morning has been buzzing with news about the big changes coming to Twitter's website. If you haven't already seen it, here's a video Twitter released accompanying the overhaul. But to save you some reading, here's a quick look at the major moves being made:

• Visually, the new Twitter.com (especially the profile pages) will look a lot like the Twitter iPad app's layout, which has been highly acclaimed since its release.
• The default avatar is being changed from the bird to an egg.
• "More" no more: the "more" button is being scrapped, and now there will just be an endless stream of tweets.
• Introduction of the mini-profile: You'll be able to utilize a mini-profile for things like bringing up information on a user in the timeline and following users. 
• There will be a huge focus on multimedia support, with 16 partnerships planned. The companies named so far are YouTube, Flickr, Justin.TV, TwitPic, UStream, Vimeo, yfrog, TwitVid, Twitgoo, Plixi, Photozou, Kiva, DeviantART, Etsy, Kickstarter, and DailyBooth.

Did you notice how I didn't say anything about Twitter page dimensions? That's because I haven't heard anything either way about whether or not the box in the middle of the Twitter page (which can't be changed/formatted by users) will be adjusted.

This is an important piece of information for the thousands of Twitter users, myself included, who have custom backgrounds on their pages. If that main box gets moved or changed, there will be many unhappy Twitter users who will have to re-format their background images.

But like I said, I haven't heard that the Twitter page dimensions will be changed, I just haven't heard that they won't be changed. And if the box does get re-sized, you can expect to see a lot of users voicing their frustration 140 characters at a time.

We've Seen a Social Media Binge, Are We Now Seeing the Purge?

If you're a social media professional or enthusiast (notice I didn't say guru), you've undoubtedly followed the constant stream of social media news. I know I've seen article after article asking "Are we done with social media yet?" and voicing their waning interest in their social media channels. In some cases, this is turning into cases of social media actually being avoided or abandoned.

Two examples in particular caught my eye. One was the article about John Mayer leaving Twitter. That's right, not taking a break...but leaving Twitter and his 3.7 million followers altogether.

The other example is Harrisburg University of Science and Technology's upcoming social experiment where they will forbid students from using social websites and applications for a week. Considering I get the shakes if I have to go a day without social media, I'm sure that experiment won't be all that popular.

But both of those stories beg the question, "Are we seeing a true social media backlash?" Social media use has been growing for years, but the number of articles and posts criticizing that use has increased even faster.

At the end of the day though, I don't see John Mayer or Harrisburg University causing the downfall of social media. However, these cases do deserve to be looked at because, as we continue to immerse ourselves in social media, we could see more instances of people backing away from it.

Learning Local

Saturday was the much-anticipated Minnesota Blogger Conference at St. Paul’s CoCo. Hosted by Arik Hanson and Melissa Berggren, the conference drew over 140 of Minnesota’s most influential bloggers.

In addition to all the people I was able to meet on Saturday, I was also left with a lot of things to think about when planning my next social media move.

Toby Cryns gave an excellent presentation about CSS for Wordpress, and I left with a pageful of plugins and websites that will save me hours of googling as I start my next web project. Just the words Firebug and css3generator.com made this entire conference worth it.

Local favorite Julio Ojeda-Zapata lead a session on pain-free blogging and introduced me to a lot of up-and-coming blogging platforms like Posterious and Tumblr. Most importantly, he gave me a reason to think about domain hosting and why you should at least consider paying for a hosting service. When it boils down to it, you need to know if you own your content or if your hosting service does.

Molly Snyder lead a conversation about how to host blogger giveaways without giving away your integrity. A great session filled with excellent questions and discussion left me wondering about the big ad networks like BlogHer. As these bloggers ponder if what they review and giveaway will be a fit for their readership, ad networks have a lot of control over blog content. Does belonging to an ad network compromise your integrity?

And of course, as we learn local, we eat local. During the conference lunch, I snuck over to the St. Paul Farmers Market to grab some cucumbers and hummus. A girl’s gotta eat.

My favorite tweet during the conference was that social media is becoming reputation management. Wise words from a group of local experts. What was your favorite takeaway from the conference?

Daily Accidents

Bad news. Steve Retka, a regular contributor here at Daily Axioms broke his hand last night after a dramatic fall in his Lakeville home. By dramatic, we mean he was walking slowly in a straight line and took a tumble.

So when you see Steve at the Minnesota Blogger Conference or at the Renaissance Festival, take it easy on him. Just because he has a splint on doesn't mean he's not heavily drugged.

An Instant Hit?

Just two days ago I wrote about Google's push into the music-streaming market, questioning its continuous expansion into new ventures while ignoring its biggest strength as a search engine.

That's why I was glad to hear that the Google Instant launch yesterday was aimed at bettering its search capabilities, because it's Google's power as a search engine that has made it the cultural icon that it is.

Basically, Google Instant allows more search results with less typing. For instance, if you type in the letter "a" the first result is Amazon.com and typing in "w" will bring up Weather.com. And although it's just been launched, Google Instant is getting pretty positive reviews.

Obviously I had to try it out for myself before passing judgment, and was pleased with what I found. The results that pop up aren't just the globally popular ones like eBay and Facebook, but seem to take your search habits and location into account. Typing in "x" not only brings up XBox but Minnesota giant Xcel Energy as well (it actually listed Xcel Energy ahead of XBox), while "v" brings up both Verizon and Valleyfair.  The top 5 results for "d" even included Dakota County where I live.

The implications here could be big, both from a consumer and business standpoint. For consumers it means less typing for presumably better results. Also, the affect of Google Instant on SEO for businesses is being heavily debated. Some are claiming Google Instant will kill SEO while others saying it will improve it, and Google's Matt Cutts wrote a great blog post about it.

So I'll give Google Instant my stamp of approval for now, although it has yet to be integrated with the browser. But more importantly, the launch of Google Instant shows that Google isn't forgetting what made them famous by re-focusing on search capabilities.