Spinach.williams

Where did the @reply come from? Why did people start putting @ at the beginning of people’s names instead of at the end as in an email address.

To start with the @ was used in twitter as a kind of checkin, to say where you are. The very first was by Ev, checking in to herbivore to tell us he’s getting a breakfst burrito. Twitter was only 4 days old when this convention started.

breakfst burrito @ herbivore. Mm!

— Evan Williams (@ev) March 25, 2006

The most common early tweet was the rather boring “@ work” although not everybody used the @ sign.

at work

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 27, 2006

@ work

— Steve Giovannetti (@stevegio) July 21, 2006

This is the dodgeball style of doing checkins. Dodgeball, the service which is now reborn as FourSquare used a text message style syntax with @location.

Some early users tried out using the @ sign for time instead of a place.

burlesque @ 2am

— Tim Roberts (@timroberts) April 9, 2006

Some simply used @ as a generally short and cute form of saying ‘at’.

where you @

— Daniel T (@Darkside) June 29, 2006

The very first attempt to use a @name to referrer to somebody was a discussion between Ben Darlow and Neil Crosby about how to scope conversations on twitter. First Ben says:

wondering if there should be a pseudo-syntax for letting a Follower on twitter know you’re directing a comment at them.

— Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) November 23, 2006

The format ends up coming as a quick reply from NeilCrosby:

@kapowaz: probably

— Neil Crosby (@NeilCrosby) November 23, 2006

There by creating the format which would become @username on twitter for scoping conversations and replying to users. They then went on to have a bit of conversation working out the regular expressions required for matching users and tracking conversations on twitter.

@Neil Crosby: would this regex match the ‘directed message’ thing I mentioned earlier? ^@([^:]):

— Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) November 23, 2006

@Ben: ^@([^:]+): would match I think

— Neil Crosby (@NeilCrosby) November 23, 2006

Norm: does this look like it makes sense to you? /^@([^:]+):/\\1\:/

— Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) November 23, 2006

s#^@([^:]+): #http://twitter.com/$1 : #

— Mark Norman Francis (@cackhanded) November 23, 2006

The @reply was created on Thanksgiving day, November 23rd, 2006. One wonders if this was the first case of geeks using twitter to avoid their family on thanksgiving. Update: They were brits working at Yahoo UK, so they were just goofing off while their american colleagues were on vacation. Also see @Garrett’s own post with a few more tweets about how the @reply came about which i missed.

A few days passed and nobody was using the new @ reply format which Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) & Neil Crosby has created. The next person to try out something like an @reply was Robert S Andersen, who now interestingly enough is creative director at Square, quickly followed with a ‘reply’ by Cameron Waters, co-founder of Square.

@ Garrett: No problem! Also, I did email you about that. I’ll send you another email today with some samples.

— Robert S Andersen (@rsa) November 29, 2006

@ Bobby: Most of us don’t know what you’re talking about!

— Cameron Walters (@ceedub) November 29, 2006

@ Cameron: Ah, the magic of Twitter! Sorry.

— Robert S Andersen (@rsa) November 29, 2006

None of the folks using @ replies are using Ben and Neil’s format or even being very consistent with their twitter names. For example, today Tom Coates does use TomCoates as a twitter name, but at the time he used his blog name, PlasticBagUK.

@ Tom Coates – the exercise to stop you from smoking i believe, bastard!!! and how do i turn these mobile updates off, must look, I look sad o/wise

— Lee Wilkins (@thisiswilks) December 5, 2006

A few other people used the new way of replying, but it died out after a couple of days. It could have been gone forever, but John Hicks kept using it. Suw comes closest to the current convention, almost a month after the idea was first proposed.

@.ben: I hope your place is earthquake proof!

— Suw(@Suw) December 21, 2006

By the first week of January 2007 the @ reply with a space is getting enough adoption that there starts to be a backlash. Because it was a convention created by users, twitter wasn’t tracking or scoping the conversations with @replies to a common subset of followers.

is wondering if anybody who use @ messagge know that he can do it with D NAME and messagge, without annoying anybody else

— Luca Conti (@pandemia) January 3, 2007

Nobody could quite decide what format to use, should there be a space or not?

@ Christian – agree I learnt PHP then javascript, whats the problem… @Ben , Here have my fireaxe, go take on IE6 and you go teach it some..!

— Gary Barber (@Tuna) January 3, 2007

Sometimes people just used the bare username followed by a : without the @ at all.

celebi23: Wait, I though Macworld started on the east coast @ 12?

— Macworld (@Macworld) January 9, 2007

Eventually Brad Wright starts explaining to people that the @name convention exists elsewhere and it’s not a twitter thing at all. Of course given some time, @name will become inexorably linked to twitter.

reminds Christian that “@[name]” is a common referencing protocol on Teh Internets, and has nothing to do with Twitter.

— Brad Wright (@intranation) January 9, 2007

People get more and more upset about the @reply spam and crossed conversations.

My god, people! “@Bob” doesn’t send just to Bob. Only send “@” messages if we will ALL care about them. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

— Nick Douglas (@toomuchnick) January 13, 2007

And finally KevinMarks is the first person to use @reply in it’s current form on Twitter. Ironically enough, explaining how @replies work.

@nick the point of using @ is to cue the rest of us in, and help us see why we might find nick amusing; we know how to use D

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) January 13, 2007

Little by little people converged in to using the twitter name, not person’s name, and also not including a space between @ and the name. The colin, :, was dropped. As the use of @reply to referrer to somebody’s name instead of a place took over, and twitter added support with a link, the use of @ as a location indictor or time has dropped off.

Twitter didn’t add official support to @replies as part of the platform until May 2008, fully 2 years after twitter launched and a year and a half after the idea of @replies was proposed.

Twitter’s been around for over 6 years now, and it’s most of it’s early history has been forgotten. The amazing thing about twitter as a platform and community is that it’s evolution has come through it’s use. Through use, people together evolve new ways of communicating. The #hashtag, the retweet, the @reply, follow friday, trending topics, real time twitter search, explaining twitter trends, cc-ing users, etc… These were all creations of the user base, people tried out ideas and build them. Twitter the company later adopted the conventions of it’s community and formalized the tools.

This letting the community of users create, and then adopting the practices is critical to how Twitter’s grown to be such an amazing platform. It’s also why new efforts to deliver a ‘consistent experience‘ are a terrible idea and if they succeed will kill twitter’s future innovation.

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Thanks to my good friend Kellan who put together a searchable archive of the first year of tweets letting us old timers relive the early days of twitter. These days Kellan is the CTO at Etsy, if you’re a hacker who’s in New York, or wants to live in New York, you should go work with him.

After capitalism: ‘There is no reason to wait for revolution. It is here already in each of us.’ Author Rebecca Walker outlines a utopian vision of a world after capitalism underpinned by a moral and spiritual revolution.

my kickstarter tale, or the myth of upward mobility forcibly deconstructed by robbery and character assassination

i kinda wanna do an rpg, and along with a sword, your dying parent/guardian
also gives you a white dude so you can be safe in your travels. the white
dude will be in your inventory rather than in your party.

there’s a dave chappelle bit about having a white guy in the car when you
get pulled over

but yeah, pretty much nobody’s safe in roadtrips, but white dudes are the
least not safe, and their more-safeness extends to whomever is with them.
even when this isn’t true, we all believe it

when telling my folks about taking a roadtrip to shoot a documentary, they
asked who i would have with me

and so i attempted at first to raise enough cash to hire a dude to reduce
the risk of being jumped at a roadside diner.

there’d been stuff like this — http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/Negro_motorist_green_bk.htm
— that’d go out through certain channels every so often

but after the civil rights act, it got a hell of a lot harder to do
something like that

and it’s not the sort of thing people talk about on yelp, so no equivalent
has come up on the internet yet

closest thing, i’d say, is the slingshot radical contacts list
so, what happens is situations wherein one is forced, in embarking on a
journey, to select travel companions based on utility rather than
companionship

or, in other words, make sure you have a white dude in your inventory
also as far as i’ve experienced there is not a single roleplaying game that
takes you out of the experience of being a white dude in the west — hell,
even jrpgs are entirely based on dragon’s quest, which was based on ultima,
with no examination of why the rules were what they were.

well, there’s barkley gaiden — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F1cOvZ3nS8
— but outside of some reworded status effects it’s still a game clearly by
white dudes who were also sports fans. the staff for the sequel is quite a
bit larger and more diverse, so i’ve got my fingers crossed.

OK, I have very wide definition of what things can be called a game, but “walking home” certainly doesn’t belong here.

it’s mimicry — as you read, and as you click, you are me. the tactile experience of clicking is your only agency, because i control the pacing, the rhythm. for those two facts, it is different from static words on a page, though perhaps not different from listening to a recited presentation. it’s very rigid — so much so, in fact, there is only one way to progress. as far as possible from paidia, or playful roleplaying (or therapeutic roleplaying), it is fixed at the other end of the spectrum, ludus, or structured play. you have one verb (“click”) and i, a series of reactions in fixed order. as interactive as eating a bowl of cereal, except there is no win state — we come to our conclusions and it is done. that’s not to say i did a particularly good job (note: i did, go me), i just want you to know that you can do this, too, and even feel good about it knowing you didn’t waste five minutes of someone’s time with a pretentious story that isn’t even a videogame. now, if you can’t be bothered to see things this way, then please replace all of that with the sentence “i am glad, unrepentant and downright deliciously foul to have conned you into reading my story by making you think it would be a videogame.”

tonight, i was someplace that was held up. two women were pistolwhipped, one hard enough to draw blood; phones were taken, wallets were taken and a guy walked out wearing my camera. #3 gone, and with no battery. just writing this all out, i feel like it could come back on me and my friends — one of whom was hit with a pistol not three feet away from myself, so withdrawn that i did not flinch: my only hope was that it would be over soon, that these other people would stop trying to shame our assailants for robbing poor squatter kids, that everyone stash every emotion for whatever time it takes before these dudes decide they’ve taken enough and leave. it’s been five hours and i still haven’t allowed myself to internalize my own material loss, the difficulty of keeping the tool of my chosen trade in a world that drives young people to robbery; or the hope the woman hit hard enough to draw blood isn’t asleep yet, isn’t ever asleep; the guilt over equating a headwound with a stolen piece of electronic equipment. nothing about anything feels right. i don’t hate myself for my nonreactions in the course of the robbery, yet i hate myself all the same for the fact this happened, and for the fact this happened as a result of young adults taking advantage of a wave of gentrification; i hate myself for attempting to be part of that wave, for thinking i could come into this town and be welcomed. message received?

walking home:

i made this. it is very short, play it.

I absolutely love animals, and I've definitely fallen in love with these colorful watercolor animals created by Susan Windsor. Susan does an amazing job bringing these animals to life with her amazingly intricate watercolor pieces.

Looking to create some colorful watercolor art? These watercolor brushes from Creative Market will help you create gorgeous and colorful art pieces just like the ones featured above.

Watercolor Photoshop Brushes

[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].

An incredible example of what can be done with laser-cutting, Amanda Ghassaei's project "Laser Cut Record" features music inscribed directly into cut discs of maple wood, acrylic, and paper, resulting in lo-fi but playable records.



For what they are, the otherwise scratchy and off-kilter audio quality is actually quite amazing, and the sounds themselves are made all the more haunting and strange by the crackling noise and resonance of the material that hosts them.

[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].

Some technical details are available at Ghassaei's Instructables page, and you can see the laser-cutting itself at work in the following video.



I'm reminded of a short letter called "Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity," written to the Proceedings of the IEEE in August 1969 by a man named Richard G. Woodbridge III. The somewhat eccentric Mr. Woodbridge explains that he has been researching accidental recording of sounds found, after careful analysis, on the surfaces of physical objects rescued from antiquity—in particular, pieces of pottery originally shaped on potters' wheels (seen here as a kind of primordial record platter).

Woodbridge even claims some sounds have been "recorded" as re-playable waves in the slowly drying shapes of oil paintings.

To listen to these lost recordings, the letter suggests, you simply hold a record cartridge near the work of pottery in question, such that the needle of the phonograph can "be positioned against a revolving pot mounted on a phono turntable (adjustable speed) 'stroked' along a paint stroke, etc." When this was done properly, he claimed, a "low-frequency chatter sound could be heard in the earphones."

That is, the voices of people present in the room during the making of the pot could be re-played from the surface of the pot itself.

[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].

Woodbridge suggests that this might have alternative applications: "This is of particular interest as it introduces the possibility of actually recalling and hearing the voices and words of eminent personages as recorded in the paint of their portraits or of famous artists in their pictures." So an experiment was orchestrated:

With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.

Through this technique, the overlooked—overlistened?—acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:

Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in “plastic” materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.

Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."

[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].

But why stop at sounds?

Perhaps in two years' time, we'll watch as Amanda Ghassaei cuts DVDs—"the data on a DVD is encoded in the form of small pits and bumps in the track of the disc"—with a combined and simultaneous laser-cutter/3D printer ensemble, coating inscribed "small pits and bumps" with reflective metals.

Suddenly, wood, rock, metal, even exposed geology in situ can host visual content. Indeed, perhaps it already does, but we haven't invented—or we simply haven't applied—the right technologies for decoding it. In other words, we have DVD players; we just haven't, learning from Richard G. Woodbridge III, used them to "read" other materials.

In August 2015, you and some friends hike up to a rock wall in the middle of Utah, and there are DVDs printed all over the surface of the hillside, full-length albums laser-burned into White Rim sandstone, and audio-visual pilgrims carrying deconstructed laser-lens systems, scanning for hidden film fests and warbling soundtracks, swarm every surface all around them.

It's the rise of geomedia.

Everywhere I look, everyone seems to be wearing mint. In fact, I can't go into a store these days without seeing a mint colored shirt, pants, or dress. I think this color is perfect for spring, and I searched the web for mint-spiration to find everything people are doing with the Spring's trendiest color. There are so many creative people out there, and I was amazed at all of the mint colored items I was able to find.

What do you think of the growing mint trend? Will you be creating something inspired by this trendy color? If so, share in the comments below...

Check out these palettes featuring Mint:

Be sure to check out these products from Creative Market that feature mint in their designs!

 

Allegedly we're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but let's be honest, when you're browsing a bookstore (online or off) it's the good designs that catch your eye and draw you in for further investigation. And when it comes to catching people's attention, what better way than with a little bit of color.

While there may not be one definitive "best of" list of books, there's still a lot of smart people out there that put out their own lists, so we decided to take a few of these and compile them into one colorful literary collection. Let's take a look at some of the best books from 2012 and the colors of their cover designs.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If we're looking for trends, the vast majority of these covers utilize earth tones like browns, tans, blues, greens, and oranges. Such palettes are pleasing to the eye and viewed easily. They feel natural, friendly, and less intimidating for potential readers. So really, earth tones make a lot of sense in an industry where you have but a brief moment to catch someone's attention. Perhaps Hollywood poster designers could take a few cues from the publishing world on embracing color and give us a break from the drab posters of late. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

What were some of your favorite books this year?

I know what you're probably wondering...turn of what century? Well these particular designs come from a magazine published in 1901 and 1902 called Shin-bijutsukai.

This magazine was a monthly publication featuring "various designs by the famous artists of to-day," and as you can see, the pages are filled with wonderful colors and trippy patterns. I don't know about you, but after looking at all of the nature elements in these designs, I feel like going for a jaunt in the park.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

If you're interested in checking out the entire magazine, you can browse the pages below or visit Archive.org to browse the full size version.

And for good measure, here's a few Japan-inspired palettes from the community. Cheers!