Michaelbox

 

I do not know exactly when it clicked in my mind or what sparked it all, but as I was sit­ting at my day job, the idea of writ­ing out tweets by hand came to me. I sat there rolling it around in my head and it came to me that peo­ple would be able to write beyond twitter’s 140 char­ac­ter limit with vari­able read­abil­ity depend­ing on clear leg­i­ble writ­ing. With the wide pro­lif­er­a­tion of cell phones con­tain­ing built in cam­eras, as well as many photo ser­vices being tied to twit­ter already, there is an extremely low entry require­ment for hand­writ­ten tweets.

There are likely still many of you ask­ing and won­der­ing why some­one may want to go through all the effort. As I have already stated above, if you have some­thing to say that requires more than 140 char­ac­ters, you can get it all in one tweet. Obvi­ously, cre­at­ing one by hand would require more time and effort than typ­ing it through the site or your favorite twit­ter client, but imag­ine the joy some­one will expe­ri­ence when they get a hand­writ­ten mes­sage directed at them. I know my first @mention, directed at emtay­lor (Twit­ter), made her day.

Writ­ing it out on a piece of paper and then post­ing a pic­ture of it, also pro­vides a broad can­vas that allows for cre­ativ­ity to flour­ish. You can draw lit­tle doo­dles, pro­vide dec­o­ra­tions, or any­thing else you can think of. I KNOW twit­ter is full of cre­ative types and I don’t see why we can’t show that off more.

Just because you write out the actual mes­sage on paper or some other medium, doesn’t mean you can’t use your allot­ted 140 char­ac­ters. Some of them would be used for the image URL, but the rest can be used for more @mentions and #tags.

I know well enough that any idea or trend that grows online is very hard to con­trol, if not impos­si­ble to. That said, I am not set­ting any “method of use” for hand­writ­ten tweets, just explain­ing the ori­gin and some uses that have already come to mind. I don’t know where the idea will go, if any­where, but I would love to see it go somewhere.

Be inven­tive, be cre­ative, make someone’s day, pay it forward…do SOMETHING.

Hand­writ­ten­tweets examples

• grace­smith (Twit­ter) sent this one to all of her fol­low­ers here
• domen­colja (Twit­ter) did this one as an alter­na­tive to dribb­ble as he lacks an account here
• design­coy­ote (Twit­ter) sent this one quot­ing Judy Gar­land here
• rude­doo­dle (Twit­ter) asked this good ques­tion here

What about yours?