You only have 140 characters per tweet. What can you possibly do to guarantee your tweet will have that immortal, everlasting quality to it?

Well, if you’re Utrecht-based design studio Autobahn, you could carve your tweets in Belgian hard stone for the Stone Carved Tweets project!

Engraver Richard Wending along with Autobahn set up a Twitter feed #StoneCarvedTweets (no longer live unfortunately) for one day as part of Amsterdam’s ABC Urban Arts Festival on June 26th. Users were invited to submit messages that would then be physically printed out from a computer, deposited in a real-world inbox & carved in stone by Richard Wending.

Stone carving aint no picnic however & true craftsmanship takes time. The day of the festival proved long enough for only 1 tweet to be carved & at an average estimated carving cost of €1500-2000 per tweet, you’d want to pick your 140 characters carefully…

Surely this approach must give weight to the thought that Twitter, as a medium, is here to stay?

Check out the project here

Digital Misfitz took place in the Science Gallery last night. This sold-out event saw Colm Grealy of Digital Reach Group provide commentary on, amongst other things, recent emerging trends in mobile technology. Colm spoke of the increasing influence of mobile technology and described the revolutionary and exciting new advertising platforms it brings with it. The Apple iPad has already sold two million units in the US alone and at last count, queries regarding the new device represented 0.8% of all internet searches; a staggering statistic considering its young age. As competitor devices to the iPad arrive in its wake, many with similarly exciting technical capabilities, myriad creative opportunities await.  Although the iPad doesn’t officially launch in the Irish market until mid July, Colm brought two iPads to the event, which we all took delight in testing at the end of the talk.  Apple Store be warned – given the fact that a total of only 150,000 units will arrive on these shores this year, you can expect lengthy queues snaking outside your shopfronts in July.

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Projection Mapping is a new and extremely visual technique being used by some major brands of late.

At a basic level Projection Mapping allows for projected animations to be superimposed over buildings and objects.

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@Anywhere is a new API service launched by twitter allowing bloggers and site owners integrate with the micro blogging platform.

@Anywhere at a very basic level converts twitter @ links to links to twitter profiles, e.g. @niall_flynn

Here at Rothco we have opted to add ‘hover cards’ which are essentially small roll over effects that are auto generated via users twitter @ handles.
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Facebook announced today that its user base has risen to 350 million.

We blogged back in June about the social network reaching 250 million users and the shift in the age groups of it audience from its original college based audience.

It is staggering to imagine that 100 million users have signed up in just under 6 months and that the audience is still growing.

Today a community wide announcement was made by Founder Mark Zuckerberg outlining the changes to come.

In the main Facebook are acknowledging the fact that privacy is a key grumble from most of its users.

“We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload.”

Another major change is removal of regional networks.

“The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.”

Personally I welcome these changes as privacy online is a huge concern.

As social networks become more embedded in our off-line lives, the ability to retain privacy in both spaces is paramount .