T-shirts, get your hot fresh Twitter t-shirts here…

Twitter Shirt from Social-Shirt.com

Whenever a group of people from Twitter meet up, we all ask each other the same question:

“Who are you on Twitter?”

Enter Social-Shirt.com, where for $17.55 (til Jan 20, see the last paragraph), you can get a t-shirt with your Twitter profile on it.

They also have shirts for StackOverflow, Identi.ca and FeedBurner.  I just ordered a few of them, and I’ll let you know what I think of the quality when they come in.

If they suck, I’ll slap the owner of Social-Shirt.com personally.  But not too hard, because, uh, it’s me.

I’ve had this idea banging around inside my empty head since the last Houston Twitter meetup.  I kept telling myself I was going to learn enough Python or PHP or whatever to slap it together and host it on Google Apps or Amazon EC2.  But here’s the problem: we’re talking about a site targeted at Twitter users, and you know what that means – it’s gonna fail.

Sites Can’t Handle Twitter’s Load.

Cool sites for Twitter users spring up all the time.  They get popular, and then all of a sudden, wham, they fall over under the load.  We all groan, and we say we’ll come back later.  Maybe we do, and maybe we don’t.

Meanwhile, the site owner is sweating bullets, throwing money and time into infrastructure trying to figure out how to handle the load or how to make the application run faster.  The fun of launching a business turns into sheer terror.

So why would I build something like that, especially with near-zero web application skills?  The last things I coded on the web were in Classic ASP, and I had no desire to revisit that again.

Built With HTML, Hosted on Amazon S3

I found a shirt vendor that had an API.  You can pass it a query string with stuff that you want to go on the shirt (like the user’s Twitter name, avatar, etc) and they build the shirt on the fly.  All I had to do was build some HTML forms, and presto, I was in the shirt business.

There’s a lot of drawbacks – for example, I’d originally wanted the user to type in their Twitter name and I’d build the rest of the shirt for them.  I’d call the Twitter API, pull the info I needed, parse it, build the shirt, etc.  But realistically, me with my limited web app skills, I can’t get there from here quickly.  I’ve got so many other things on my plate that I just wasn’t going to be able to bang that out.

So I gave up.  I built it in plain old HTML, made the users type in their own profile info, hosted it on Amazon S3, and called it done.  Besides, if I have a choice between putting money into the platform, or putting money into promotion, guess which one is going to yield more?  My money’s on promotion.

Speaking of Which: They’re On Sale for $17.55!

You get $4.40 off each shirt if you enter the promo code 440SHIRTSALE during checkout before January 20, 2009 at 11:59pm PST , bringing the shirts down to $17.55.  Pretty good deal, actually.

If you buy one, let me know what you think of it!  I’m already giddy with excitement for mine to come in.