The coolest thing about open communities is the unexpected idea that comes of all the interaction. First, take a status message tool with a bunch of active users. Second, have one of those new users be a programmer. Third, make sure the host site releases an API to allow other developers to plug into the community. Fourth, be inspired by some of the things already out there. Bam!
Powered by Andrea Denzler’s AndreaMosaic, a programmer new to Twitter created a tool to turn 20,000 user profile photos into the building blocks of art. Almost overnight, he turned his new account into a friend haven, going from a request for 20 friends on June 11 to over 10,000 1500 in a couple days. Less than a week into his fifteen minutes, twitter_mosaic still has to figure out what he wants to do with the interest. At present, he’s accepting suggestions for images to make into mosaics as comments in a blog post. That will probably become ineffective pretty quickly.
This image, sent to me by my human RSS feed (Tyler) this afternoon, was very eye-catching:
