Friday 24 July 2015

Twitter nixes profile backgrounds

In the past week or so Twitter made the switch and removed people's profile background images. People often used very personal and carefully designed images as the background of their Twitter profiles but that choice has now been removed by the company. Twitter homepages now all share the same bland, corporate design.

Some people might resent this change, or at least I have heard that some people do, but on my part I find it hard to work up much outrage for something that is in reality so minor in the wider scheme of things. This despite the fact that I was quite proud of my profile background image - which you can see here. It was taken from an old five-and-a-half inch floppy disk that had survived from the days of the blue screen of death - I bought my first PC in around 1987 - and that I had for some reason retained in my archives. When I say "survived" I mean that there had been several changes of address, including a change of country, after I had relocated the family to Japan in 1992.

When it came to choosing an image for my Twitter profile in 2009 or thereabouts it seemed an easy choice for me to use this image. The image, which was originally made using one of those clumsy "paint" programs in the days of 64-bit colour, showed a drawing I made in the program of my own hand, but where it had been modified to look like a face. At the ends of the fingers there are rays coming out, like lasers. There are also some bullet-like holes to complete the fighting ensemble.

When Twitter appeared the image seemed quite prescient, so I deployed it on my profile. Noone made any remarks about it in all those years of it being there. So there you go!

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