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- June 30, 2008 — 01:00 PM PDT — by —
UPDATE: see the comments section for a template you can use to create your own extended Twitter profile!
While simplicity and a 140 character limit on messages is a big reason for Twitter’s success, the limitation of 160 characters on your profile biography is a constraint for some people, especially those with a lot to say about themselves or several URLs to direct people towards.
Enter a few creative Twitter users, who have come up with a somewhat standardized background design for creating a more robust profile. As pictured below, the idea is to add additional information about yourself, display a bigger picture, and link up to all of your social networking profiles and web sites. The trend was started by @rickmahn, and then followed by fellow social media gurus @problogger and @waynesutton.
While hardly ground-breaking, I think this mini-movement highlights something that at least some Twitter users are currently clamoring for – more ways to discover new people on the Web site. That was evident when we recently reviewed Twellow – the impressive new people search tool for Twitter – and quickly saw it become the most talked about item on the microblogging service according to Summize’s “trending topics.”
In this case, the “extended profiles” are simply background images, but it gets my head spinning thinking about the other possibilities for enhancing your Twitter profile. For example, if Twitter was to open up the user profiles and allow you to insert your own HTML and CSS, you could potentially begin pulling in your activity streams from services like FriendFeed, blog posts, or widgets (think Jaxtr, Meebo, etc.) to let other Twitter users learn more about you or contact you in different ways.
Of course, those that argue that Twitter is just a messaging platform like e-mail or IM would disagree with this direction, as it moves it much more into the realm of becoming a profile-centric social network. On the other hand, there are dozens of other ways to experience Twitter – via phone, via desktop app, or simply via the Web and your friend timeline. Hence, if Twitter moved in this direction, those that prefer less clutter or couldn’t care less about checking out your dozen different social networking profiles wouldn’t notice a thing.
Meanwhile, both us and Twitter probably shouldn’t put the cart before the horse. We’ll just be happy if @mashable, @adamostrow, @kristennicole2, @seanpaune, @rizzn, and @paulglazowski replies keep working through this week and ask kindly for more features sometime down the road 
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