darrenbarefoot.com

A couple of weeks ago, I made some silly comics to promote a product review to some bloggers. I used Comic Life, an easy-to-use app that comes with OS X.

Rebecca and John just got their printer, and Rebecca made a fun comic of her own to, uh, celebrate its arrival.

That’s when I had this week’s free idea: a microblogging platform based around comic book frames. It works like Twitter, except that each time you want to post, you choose an image (probably of yourself) and a type of thought or speech balloon. Then you type your message.

Here’s my, er, prototype:

The app would integrate with Flickr and other photo-sharing services, enabling you to choose from any of your photos, or photos with a particular tag. You could also use your webcam to snap a photo.

There’s obviously the problem of ‘twittering’ from your mobile device, but you could set up one or more default comic frames for posting on the go, or for when you couldn’t be arsed to make a new comic frame.

Ironically, what I’m describing feels slightly like what Flickr briefly was when I first saw it. Kind of a real-time chat with photo-sharing on the fly.

I suppose the downside is that it’s slower-per-post than Twitter would be, and people are very attracted to the enforced brevity (a side effect is that Twitter seems to be an Ego Distillation Engine, but more on that another time).

What do you think of this week’s silly idea? Maybe it already exists?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 1:46 am and is filed under Technology. Tag Testing Project: comics, fun, microblogging, twitter. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.