Unusual Twitter Alerts
tl;dr: I made push.twtt.rs, prompt.twtt.rs and circles.twtt.rs for your (and my) enjoyment.
I wasn’t the first to mock up imaginary push notifications from Twitter, and I regret that I don’t even remember from whom it was that I stole my first base layer (including the “May 2B” typo)
I got hooked on this idea, though, and did a few over the last year. Some of my favorites:
and
and
What started off as a manual generation process eventually ended up with a fairly low-effort Pixelmator template… but then other folks wanted to make them easily too. So I made an online generator and put it at push.twtt.rs.
The thing took about 30 minutes to put together, I guess, including setting up the domain and hosting. The most obvious nice-to-have would be the ability to save and/or tweet the image directly… but that would’ve taken more time than I had to invest in a toy like this. On a Mac, ⌃⇧⌘4 copies a selection of the screen to the clipboard, and you can paste it right into Twitter for Mac.
For me it’s nice having the time fixed at 9:32, as a kind of signature of this thing; it’s not intended to be a generator of forensically sound fakes. And even though it’s primitive it’s been gratifying to see the fun others have had with it. @samir is a master
@CaseyNewton got started recently with a winner:
@fordm’s debut resonated with a few:
and @jazzychad weighed in recently on my leaving Twitter:
Bonus Generators
I also made a couple of other Twitter-related generators. At prompt.twtt.rs you can make in-app prompts like this one, which Twitter uses from time to time:
and at circles.twtt.rs you can make your own Twitter strategy slide with the now-familiar nested circles. Here’s mine:
Epilogue
I made and now share these things purely in the name of fun. One of the things I enjoyed most about working at Twitter — from early 2010 through early 2015 — was the company’s humility, its playfulness, its sense of humor, and its willingness to laugh at itself. In that context I think these toys fit perfectly.
An earlier version of this post was published at blog.isaach.com on March 6, 2015.
