The ultimate guide to enhance your twitter background and how it became a trend

Posted on March 6, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

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I’m sure by now you know about twitter extended backgrounds, as some call it but do you know how they became a trend and a business model to some? Well here’s a brief history lesson and a list of sites if you want to “pimp” out or band your twitter background.

Early June 2008, I saw @rickmahn ’s twitter background and created one similar to his matching my current wayne-sutton.com site.

Next @Problogger had his twitter background created and I sent a tweet to @Mashable & @TechCrunch saying who was going to blog about this new trend first Mashable or TechCrunch? Mashable beat TechCrunch to the post and the post was published on June 30th, 2008 by @AdamOstrow. The post was called “Make Twitter Your Social Aggregator: Create An Extended Profile”

In the comments of the post I left the url of the photoshop document for tweeple to create their own custom twitter background. Since then it has been downloaded over 1,160 times. You can download it here too.

It was noted in the comments that @Philcampbell had create his twitter background before @rickmahn’s either way one of the two were one of the first.

From there http://www.twitterimage.com/ was launched by @hughbriss who created backgrounds for social media rock stars @chrisbrogan @kbodnar32 @chrispirillo and the rest is almost history, twitter extended backgrounds was here to stay.

If you’re looking to customize your twitter background or event make some money off your twitter profile take a look at the list below.

Free backgrounds

http://www.twitbacks.com
http://www.twitterbacks.com
http://tweetbacks.com
http://www.quickbacks.com
http://www.ministryspaces.com
http://mytweetspace.com
http://www.twitterbackgroundimages.com

Paid Background:
http://tweetpages.com
http://www.twitterimage.com

Make Money from your twitter background:

http://www.twittad.com

Twitter background galleries

http://www.twittergallery.com
http://www.customtwit.com
http://twitterbackgroundsgallery.com

Other twitter background blog post:
The 10 Best Twitter Background Designs & Themes
Pimp my Twitter – Twitter backgrounds and design
Create A Twitter Background Using PowerPoint
Enforce Your Brand On Twitter: Use A Custom Background

What twitter user do think has the best twitter extended background?
Do you know other twitter background sites?

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Author: Wayne Sutton

Wayne Sutton, Business Development/Marketing Strategist for TriOut. You can follow Wayne on Twitter, or on Facebook. Wayne can be reached via email at wayne@trioutnc.com

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 2:35 PM and is filed under Featured, Micro-Blogging, Social Media, Tweets, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

24 Comments

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March 6, 2009

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Marina Krutchinsky said:

Great post, Wayne! Thanks for mentioning TwitterBackgroundsGallery.com We daily feature 5-10 best backgrounds submitted and recommended by twitter fans themselves. By now the collection has grown to 600+ entries in 20+ categories. BTW, have you seen your own BG feature in the gallery http://twitterbackgroundsgallery.com/2009/01/06/waynesutton/? ;)

Marina Krutchinsky’s last blog post..@designerdepot
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March 6, 2009

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Pamir | Reiki Help Blog said:

There’s one major problem with Twitter backgrounds: A lot of the linking info can end up being hidden.

For instance Problogger’s websites are lost under the Twitter stream even on my widescreen at 1360×768 resolution.

Since there are few design & online standards, backgrounds become iffy, although I use one of the free services.

It’s time that Twitter allowed the ability to include a full profile with more than one link. What’s currently allowed is just not ’social.’

Good list of resources here though. For a true extended profile I prefer Retaggr’s new ability to host your own domain name or chi.mp.

http://pamirkiciman.info/
http://pamirkiciman.mp/

Pamir | Reiki Help Blog’s last blog post..The business of Practical Enlightenment
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March 6, 2009

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Wayne Sutton said:

@Marina thanks for the link about being featured.

@Gassho, yes there should be a standard and hopefully twitter will allow us to add more than one link soon.

Thanks for the comments
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March 6, 2009

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MediaMarc said:

Thanks Wayne I have to give it up, another great post. But hopefully we will continue to see designers come up with new and creative twitter backgrouds

MediaMarc’s last blog post..Twitter Bug: This Page Doesn’t Exist!
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March 6, 2009

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Rick Mahn said:

Hi Wayne, thanks for the mention! While I’d love to take credit for at least a part of the Twitter backgrounds, I’m sure someone else was doing them before I was.

I did create mine without seeing any like it previously, but many folks were thinking along the same lines at that time: branding.

Heck, it’s probably time for me to update mine in any case.

-Rick

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March 8, 2009

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jack said:

here’s another free app that we launched about 2 – 3 weeks ago. http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com. It gives people who don’t have the design skills/tools the ability to design a professional looking background. check it out.
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March 8, 2009

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Wayne Sutton said:

@jack thanks for the link, good luck with the site
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March 8, 2009

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Rahul said:

Thanks for the list of twitter background. I’d like to visit all of those to choose the best background for myself as well.

Cheers.

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March 8, 2009

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B.E. Johnson said:

Good article. Will help a lot of folks up their presence.

Made my background from a full page program book ad for one of my engagements that I had created some time back and added social media specific elements to it. Doesn’t even try to be seen on either side of the Twitter panel. There is no way to really determine how wide a given user’s window will be, so use that to encourage use of “View Background Image” from the browser and see the whole thing unencumbered.
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March 9, 2009

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Michael Rowe said:

Wayne, Thanks for a great post.. will need to spiff up the Dogear-Nation twitter account!

Michael Rowe’s last blog post..Dogear-Nation – Episode 92 – Manga Tweet
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March 10, 2009

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Ariq said:

Great read kind sir. It took me half a day to “pimp” out my twitter page; so I mad props to any one who takes the time to do it.
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April 3, 2009

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Doctor Twitter said:

Great article Wayne, but you forgot one of the best twitter layout sites..Doctor Twitter..one click apply backgrounds and all types of categories..good article either way..;)

Doctor Twitter’s last blog post..April Fools Day Twitter Background
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December 7, 2009

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Martin said:

I thank you for your article.

I followed these links and found, that you don’t actually have to pay to get cool Twitter backgrounds. I found many web pages, which also offer cool and interesting design for Twitter and you can get them for free.
I hope that this will help you and the readers of this blog. Thank you again and I encourage you to write even more articles like this. They inspire a lot!

Here is the link to article an article, which I wrote: http://fr.ee/article/where-to-find-free-twitter-backgrounds
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