More and more people like and user Twitter and therefore many siteowners want to place a follow-link on their website. But as simple text links are too uninteresting, we have collected the best icons and graphics on the internet. 

Twitter icon by fast icon

Twitter icon set by smashing magazine

Twitter social icon by design reviver

31 twitter icons by vincentabry

A little bird told me by mattknow

Twitter icons by flockey

Twitter icon by phiredesign

Cute twitter bird icon by wefunction

Free twitter graphics by randa clay design

Twitter birdy icon by Loondesign

Twitter icons by icontexto

It’s twitter time! by productivedreams

Twitter icons with attitude by monkeyworks

Pratika twitter icon by smashing magazine

(MAX)Icone blog by webfruits

Web 2Origami by Iampaddy

High resolution twitter bird icons by the design superhero

Happy twitter birds by webdesign.fm

Cute tweeters icon set by smashing magazine

Glossy twitter icons by AODdesign

Sticky twitter icons by Kuerbisfeld

The leaves fall by smashing magazine

For all who want to make their own one:

Create a twitter style bird mascot by vectortuts

Mark Zuckerberg did it and many others! They build successful websites and applications, and you can do the same! The first and most important thing is the idea. If your idea has potential then why not give it a try! Many people haven’t thought of becoming famous and rich by their websites but they were wrong.

What do you need to start your own website, blog or web application?

The idea – it’s the A and O to be successful! Are there already sites that do the same as yours? Is it possible to make money with your idea (sell premium content, banner advertising) or do you just want to be popular?

The website – do you master (x)HTML, PHP and JavaScript and maybe another language like Java? The point is – make yourself clear what is possible with your capabilities and what not. Maybe hire a professional programmer, but keep in mind that they are very expensive. Also nowadays it’s essential to permanently keep an eye on your sites’ security.

The design/layout – in the internet you find millions of examples of good web-designs. You can also find a lot of guides and tutorials that will help you step by step.

The server – how big is your project? Do you think you need a server right from the beginning? Or is a Shared Plan enough for a few weeks? If you have a heavy-load online application, calculate your budget carefully. Nothing is angrier than having the ultimate website but not the resources to host and operate it.

The breaks – After your project is running and even during the building time – take breaks! Turn off and do anything apart from thinking about your website. It’s a very important, maybe the most important thing you should take care of unless you want to lose the view on the whole.

When to start your website? – Now. Don’t lose time.

Good Blogs and Sites for more information

• OnStartups, Advice for Software Startups. Invaluable guides for entrepreneurs.
• DoshDosh, Internet Marketing and Social Media. Many tips and tricks on how to make the big money with any kind of website.
• Mashable!, The Social Networking Blog. See the ideas of other people and learn from them.

Now, three years after the release of Firefox v1.0, the revolutionary browser has been downloaded over 400 million times!

When the first version of the browser hit the internet back in 2004, it took only 99 days for the Firefox to be downloaded by more than 25 million delighted users. After 1 year the number quadrupled and passed the 100 million downloads mark.

This time was the starting signal for a never-ending, striking success of a web browser – it is free, has tons of good extensions and themes, has a huge community and made us feel the web2.0!

Zooomr has recently added a people search to it’s site. Now you can find other users and friends on Zooomr by searching for their names or email addresses. After starting your search you will be prompted to the normal photoresults-page. But you can click on a ‘People’-tab and it displays you all the people found in their databases.

All-in-all the people search is a useful update and leads Zooomr closer to social networking.

Peteris Krumins’ did it again! After building a Reddit clone with integrated picture previews (Reddit Media) he now coded a photoversion of digg.com – digpicz!

All he needed was the digg API and a bit code, to create a service many users were waiting for. Until now just a short announcement has been made on the official digg-blog that a picture page will be added to digg in the following weeks.. and he did it in about 7 hours!

To get more details on how Peteris build the site, see his blog.

Over the last few months a lot of photo editing services launched. To name a few popular sites: Picnik, Fauxto, Phixr, picture2life. And now a new startup wants to beat’em all – FotoFlexer.

With FotoFlexer you can easily import and export pictures from social networks (Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace) and edit them on the go. It seems as if FotoFlexer combines all the great functionalities of other existing sites and bundled them into one masterpiece! I don’t want to say that desktop photo editing is dead, but it has another big competitor. Professionals will probably stick to Photoshop or GIMP however normal people can make use of this sites to edit,share and store photos with ease.

What makes FotoFlexer top the list? I tested it for a while and and I can say that it has many features I missed using other online editors! Just click ‘start flexing’, connect to e.g. your Flickr account or manually upload a picture and begin to edit your photos. You can do that by changing colors, resizing, adding effects or turning your whole image into a cartoon.

So whenever you need a heavyset photo editor, I would prefer using FotoFlexer!

The video-uploading services like YouTube are taking a big part in the history of the web 2.0. Many people became popular for just uploading a weird video on such a site. So I want to give you a short overview of some big video-sharing services. I compared 7 videoportals in the categories quality and community. I’ve chosen 5 well-known and 2 special-interests portals. I know there are a lot of other good videosites on the internet and maybe, I present them in another article.

YouTube

If someone talks about video-upload services, the first site everyone mentions is Youtube. It was the first big one and has the largest community. And to reach a wide audience, you should upload your video to this portal. Uploaded videos can have a maximum size of 100MB and a maximum length of 10minutes. The allowed formats are: .wmv, .avi, .mov, .mpg. The quality you can present a video is acceptable but there are better services for high quality videos on the WWW (e.g. Stage6).

myspacetv.com

A few month ago MySpace joined the group of videoportals with their new project MySpaceTV. MySpaceTV has a clearly structured menu and all functions you need for watching a video, e.g. fullscreen. Nevertheless I’m really disappointed of MySpace because they copied a lot of things from YouTube. (Netdesignz.de has a comparison of the two portals. It’s a German blog but the pictures show it all.)

Google Video

Google Video is similar to Youtube but it doesn’t has such a big community. The conditions a video must keep are similar to YouTube. (Both sites, YouTube and Google Video, belong to Google, Inc.)

Yahoo! Video

Yahoo! Video is a videoportal by Yahoo! with more than 820Million videos uploaded (that number is from November 2006 – I couldn’t find any newer). In comparison to GoogleVideo Yahoo!Video has a very good design. Also the menu is better and Yahoo! Video offers many features a videocommunities need (e.g. favorites, tags and channels) and so it’s definitively the better choice. Same quality as most flash-enabled sites, large community and an intuitive, clear design.

Dailymotion

Dailymotion is a videportal, based in France. In comparison with other flash-enabled sites it has a appreciable better quality. Also Dailymotion allows you to upload 20minutes lasting videos with a size of 150MB. It support the same file-formats as YouTube but with higher resolutions.

2 ‘HD’-Video Portals

Stage6

A videoportal with a great quality and a fast connection – Stage6. Stage6 just supports Divx because it’s a project of DivX.com but that is enough. It’s still a small site but it’s growing. It offers a great quality in combination with fast streaming, which make this startup my personal favorite.

videocommunity

Videocommunity also is a relative small video-uploading service but as Stage6 it’s one of the #1 choices for quality-lovers. This site allows you to upload video even in HD-Quality which is a big plus and the downloading speed is fast enough to see a video without breaks what you can’t say about YouTube. Another good aspect of videocommunity is that is supports most of all video formats(avi, mpeg, mov, wmf, wmv, mp4, mp3, wav, aiff, wma). But there are also disadvantages. You are just allowed to upload 6 files a month with a total length of 15 minutes. 15 minutes are enough for homevideos and it’s more than Youtube offers but the 15 minutes-limit counts for all files together.

The Duel:

Quality:

1. Stage6 – 10/10
2. videocummunity – 9/10
3. dailymotion – 7/10
   

Biggest community:

1. Youtube – 10/10
2. Yahoo! Video – 8/10
3. Dailymotion – 7/10

So you see/read that there are a lot of good and popular videoportals you just need to decide which platform is the best for hosting/presenting your homevideos!

A few weeks ago, the startup Anywhere.FM opened it’s gates for the masses. It’s a service where you can upload single music files or your whole iTunes library (they offer a good tool to manage this) .

You can listen to your uploaded songs, through their intuitive and well-designed online player. Upload, create playlists or find friends and see/hear what music they prefer. I spend a lot of time using their service. I added a few friends to my buddylist, compared our likings and just listened to wonderful songs for hours . Until now the site has about 2.7Million uploaded titles and is still growing.

So I warmly recommend you to at least have a look at their beautiful and useful service. Listen to your music from ‘anywhere’ was never easier!

Update: A user called attention to other sites flying out there and offering similar services. If you like Anywhere.FM also see: MediaMaster, Imeem, Streampad, Maestro