Twitter is popular and gaining popularity every day. The number of users is in the millions. But, is it useful? That’s like asking if a knife is dangerous. The answer is, “Well, it can be.”

If you want huge numbers of followers, you’re on your own. That is not my goal. For me, Twitter is a great source for news and ideas. SEO gurus, marketing wizards and prostitutes just clog-up the stream and make it impossible for me to find the people who’s tweets I really want to read. Anyone who has 35,000 followers and follow them all isn’t seeing your tweets, anyway. You are as invisible to them as you were before you started following each other.

1. Use Lists. Create a list of twitter accounts you actually want to read. Keep it private. Private lists are great because nobody else knows the list exists or that they’re on it.

2. Create secondary lists of twitter accounts that interest you. Read them as often or infrequently as you like. This puts you in control. Clients, local businesses, professional colleagues, friends and relatives, etc. Create lists that help you.

3. Before you follow someone, look at their profile. Read their tweets. Look at their location and bio. Click on the link to their website. Know who it is you’re connecting with.

4. Use the search feature. Search for terms you are interested in. It’s a great way to find quality accounts to follow.

5. Use the #______ feature to be found in the same way.

6. Use features that incorporate Twitter into other social networks. I have friends who aren’t on twitter. They use the status update feature on Facebook or LinkedIn, instead. Don’t leave ‘em out. Get them involved, too.

7. Have fun with twitter and tweet a variety of things. Use it to show a bit about your personality.

Do YOU have any tips for me? I’d love to hear them and I’m sure other people would, too. Thanks.

Models for simulating the severe forms of color blindness are well developed. Not so for the milder and much more common types of colorblindness, the so-called anomalous deficiencies. These are tougher to model because they vary on an individual basis and can actually change over time. This is a far more common condition than any type of complete color blindness. Most of these resources focus on modeling the severe types of color blindness. Nevertheless, they provide a good indication for the less severe types.

Here’s how they work: they model how the human eye perceives color based on the retina’s cone responses. Then, they adjust the model to mimic the modified cone responses of a color blind individual, thus allowing those of us with normal vision to get a better idea of what the world looks like to them.

If you want to get a better idea of what the your color blind web visitors actually see, I recommend looking at at least 50 different side-by-side examples. (I feel another blog post coming on.) Once you start to get an idea of what’s happening here, play with the tools that let you calibrate the degree of various color vision deficiencies. A few are listed below.

Color Blindness Simulator lets you upload an image file and see how it looks to those with any one of the three color blindness disorders.

Color Matrix Library is a free javascript library that can be used to simulate color blindness. There are several other interesting items that may be of interest to designers as well.

Accessibility Color Wheel shows you how text looks under different color blindness models. And, it lets you modify the contrast ratio. How cool is that? Just mouse over the unque color wheel and let the Javascript do it’s thing. I like this page a lot.

Visicheck has several interesting color blindness simulation tools (some online and even an Adobe Photoshop plugin you can download free) and copious amounts of great information.

You ever heard of John Dalton (1766-1844)? A fascinating character. He was a color blind scientist and one of the first men to research color blindness. He thought his color blindness was caused by a discoloration of his ocular fluid. Wrong, John! Perhaps that’s why he’s better known for his pioneering work in the development of modern atomic theory. On 21 October 1803, John Dalton presented the first table of atomic weights at a small gathering of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical society. He proposed that the properties of all materials were determined by the atoms of which they were made. His ideas laid the foundations of modern chemistry and inspired today’s nanotechnologists.

Color Oracle is a downloadable color blindness simulator for Windows, Mac and Linux. Windows and Linux users will need Java 6.

Color Doctor v2.1 from Fujitsu is a free download for Windows XP and Vista that simulates the display content according to grayscale and various color characteristics.

Sim Daltonism v1.0.3 is a free color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and displays the result as seen by a color blind person in a floating palette. It also works if the color blind person is not in a floating palette. What?

ColorSelector v5.1 is free software for judging the legibility of background and text colors. It runs on the Windows® and Mac OS X operating systems.

Web Accessibility Toolbar is provided free by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team of Vision Australia. It runs on Windows XP, comes in several languages and is available for IE and Opera.

Huetility Colorblind Simulator let’s you “see what color blind people see using your iPhone” as they put it. I’m not sure I want other people looking at my iPhone, however.

Contrast Analyser, v2.2 is primarily a tool for checking foreground & background color combinations to determine if they provide good colour visibility. It also contains functionality to create simulations of certain visual conditions such as colour blindness.

W3C Contrast Ratio Guidelines A bit dry, but it informative. BTW, contrast becomes an issue for almost everyone as we age. That’s why older people need more light to see stuff.

ColorSchemer Studio is a software program for creating color schemes (duh) that has many useful features. Use the Color Blindness Simulation to see what your color schemes will look like to users with any one of 8 different types of color deficient vision.

Here’s a good article describing how to design web pages for color blind people.

The Facebook Awarness for Color blindness group can be found here. It isn’t very active, but it is a great way to meet color blind people on whom you can test your page designs.

There’s even a monitor, the Eizo SX2462W that “Simulates two types of red-green color vision deficiency – ptotanopia and deuteranopia – for verification of how color schemes appear to those with color blindness. Simulation is done in real time for still and moving images, making it a practical alternative to software-based tools.” You do have to download some free software from them to make it do that, however.

Also, check out Eizo’s Color Universal Design Handbook. The handbook is about design in general but it contains lots of interesting suggestions that can be adapted to web design. It’s very short and an easy read. I highly recommend it.

The WebSite of the future is already here. WebSites are like clothes. Consumers and web designers need to realize that. I don’t know about you, but I don’t get my clothes from a tailor. Tailor made clothes are for rich people. I buy my clothes off the rack. I don’t have a problem with that, either. It’s easy, I have a choice of prices, they’re easy to maintain (I can’t iron to save my life and I don’t have to) and they look great.

In theory, I do have another option, though. I can make my own clothes. I remember, when I was about 10 my mom got herself a sewing machine. She had a great time with it. She made herself all kinds of clothes. Well, dresses and skirts, mostly. And, they looked great! But, mom was an exceptional woman. Sewing clothes was fun for her. Along with raising a family, she also went to the public library and got 5 sci-fi books every week. She used to read them while she was knitting or doing needle point. As I said, mom was exceptional. I’m not. In fact, much like ironing, I just can’t sew. Once, while sewing a patch on the knee of my jeans, I sewed the leg together. My arm was in it, so I don’t know how I did that. But, I did. I’m great with a scissors (the secret is to rest it on a flat surface as you cut, so your hand is stable) but my stitches always bring Frankenstein to mind. So, in theory, I could make my own clothes. But, they’d look horrible.

Today, custom websites are expensive. Whether it’s a particular look that’s needed or special functionality doesn’t matter. Custom websites are pricey. Don’t expect that to change, either. In the year 2020, custom websites will only be for the very wealthy (read businesses) and there will be fewer of them. Let me re-phrase that. Custom websites will be a lower percentage of the total websites in 2020 than they are today. Why do I think that? Because, by then, people will understand that “off the rack” is just fine. Today, if you say the word “template” web designers and consumers who imagine themselves to be clever and in-the-know (like tire kickers at a car dealership) turn their noses up. The fact is, everything is made up of parts and I haven’t seen a particularly remarkable web page design in, well, ever. I have seen some wonderful interface elements, to be sure. But, page layout is just that. Layout.

One of the most popular platforms today is WordPress. You’re looking at an example of it, now. It’s an application that stores information, such as this text, in a database and displays it in a template. The Home page is one template. This article page is another template. You can apply themes, which change the look of all the templates on the site. People love WordPress, even though it is essentially a template, albeit one on steroids.

Another thing people like is Flash websites. You don’t see a lot of them in the wild today. However, you do see a lot of Flash advertisements. Why? Because people like animation. They like seein’ stuff move. When I show clients sample websites, they always like the Flash sites the best. The fact they’re tougher to update than an HTML or CMS based site is why people steer clear of them. But, in the last couple years, a new option has emerged: XML Flash WebSites. These let you control the modules and content of the Flash site through XML. There are programs (scripts) available that let you update the XML files in a web browser, so no need for FTP. MyFlashXML.com is a company that sells some very amazing XML Flash templates. Part of why they’re so interesting and unique is the use of a relatively new technology, PaperVision3D (See an example or their blog.) I think we are going to see a lot of this kind of stuff in the future. It may not be full websites but widgets that find their way into WordPress’ descendants.

In 2020, much of the work web designers do will be modifying and setting up these templates. Do-it-yourselfers and hobbyists will have better options available to them, but unless they are exceptional people, they will still have a very hard time making a professional looking website, because the bar will have been raised.