San Francisco is doing everything it can to retain its status as the place to be in tech. The city has set up an ad hoc advisory council, which includes Twitter representatives, in order to evaluate how the city’s tax structure impacts big tech companies.
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Time for another rant. My usual disclaimer applies.

Your Twitter Background Is Free And Off The Shelf

Here’s the thing – customised Twitter backgrounds are largely a waste of time. Until Twitter decides to make them interactive and allows us to add links and apps and other customisable options – which could perhaps let them compete with Facebook pages – unless you’re very important there’s really not a lot of point in spending a lot of time and effort on your background.

By and large, and because there’s not much to do once they get there, people only tend to visit your profile page directly (and thus see your background) a couple of times – once, when they’re deciding whether to follow you when you’re an unknown quantity, and possibly a second time when they’re trying to remember who the heck you are a few months later.

If you simply must have a background, you’re better off customising it yourself (perhaps utilising the services of your favourite designer pal), using a simple (and original) tile, or even one of Twitter’s options, than you are using a freebie service that proudly displays TWITTERBACKGROUND.ORG on the top-left of the page. Not only does that look lame, it is lame.

And even if your background is absolutely first class, remember that different monitor sizes and screen resolutions mean that all those email address, URLs and telephone numbers you carefully placed on the left sidebar can be completely invisible to those millions of people using netbooks and mobile handsets.

Unless you’re very skilled and/or can put together something absolutely incredible – that works on any screen size – it really isn’t worth going to too much trouble. Read more