TwiBack – New Twitter Application to Use Multiple Backgrounds and Profile Pictures and Rotate Them

What do you pay attention to when you visit a profile of some new Twitter follower? I am quite sure you do notice the Twitter background and this is what sends you a certain message in addition to that in the bio and the latest updates.

I myself have a few observations regarding what a background may mean on Twitter. For example, a default background or one of the standard themes is often an indication of a spammer or yet another faceless account that will try to sell me something. A background that contains a very happy smiling photo of the user along with all the contact details usually demonstrates an independent marketing or consulting professional who relies on Twitter heavily to drive sales – hence the aggressive background.

I myself have chosen quite a neutral photo of some flowers on the keyboard of my laptop – simply because I liked the photo and it combined the two things that I like: technology and nature. In fact, I never visit my own Twitter page as I rely on Twhirl for all my Twitter-related activities and only visit pages of those people who follow me or say something particularly interesting so I want to see more of their updates in retrospect.

So I have had no idea what my own background actually looked like when people visited my profile – though to my surprise, my own background has changed significantly after I initially uploaded the photo (probably due to some changes in how image resolution is processed). But I’ll have to tell you that it will still probably stay this way because Twitter procedure of changing the backgrounds is not the most user-friendly one – so I am definitely too lazy to deal with it again.

But now I have found out that a dedicated application exists that is intended to make everything that is related to visual aspects of Twitter in your life much easier. The name is TwiBack and the application has two main features: you can upload multiple photos for backgrounds or profile pictures here and you can decide how such photos will rotate in your Twitter profile.

At that you can also decide on some individual settings for the background photos, including if the image should be tiled and if some background color should be selected additionally. You can even select your own time zone and the application will rotate photos exactly at the time you want it following the frequency specified.

As someone who constantly keeps asking about business models whenever I review a startup, I was totally surprised when I figured out that the application even has a monetization idea at place: they plan to serve as a marketplace where advertisers will pay to have their ads displayed as the backgrounds or profile pictures of Twitter users they choose among the application users. And while I have serious doubts about people looking at the backgrounds frequently, the profile pictures are a very reasonable platform for advertising given that these icons are actually delivered to everyone subscribed to the user-via the web interface or via some desktop or online client.

Same as many other useful applications, TwiBack was born out of a real need of its creators – a web design company from Latvia that had a corporate Twitter account and wanted to display the photos of employees on this page – with a new photo displayed every day. And since the only way to do this was to do it manually, they have decided to create an application to do just that.

This certainly proves that it’s hard to come up with an amazing idea out of nothing but if you have a need yourself, chances are there are people who have a very similar need and will use your application. And if the guys manage to bring advertisers here, this will be a very promising idea for quite a number of Twitter users looking to monetize their time and efforts dedicated to Twitter.