I joined Twitter in May of 2009. Just before college.

At that time, Twitter was sold itself as a way to send quick updates to the people you knew in real life.

There were no hashtags, retweets, or threads. And people tweeted via text message from their flip phones.

Oh boy, have things changed.

Twitter ultimately became the global, real-time, viral chat room. It brings together like-minded people and keeps you in the know.

Today, its home page makes that clear.

Mastering the real-time nature of Twitter can be life-changing.

I've witnessed talented people stand out, land jobs, build businesses, and even make close friendships with people they met on Twitter.

But we're human. We learn things, form new opinions, and (maybe) share just a little too much from time to time.

I thought my Twitter timeline should reflect my current thoughts and ideas, not my old ones.

So I hacked together some code that I eventually called Tweet Sweeper. It's a dead-simple app that automatically deletes my old tweets.

With a few clicks, I can set how long I want to keep my tweets and turn on Tweet Sweeper.

In a true set-it-and-forget-it fashion, Tweet Sweeper now does the heavy lifting of finding and deleting old tweets, every day.

Now my timeline is timely and relevant, just like Twitter itself.

Tweet Sweeper is available to everyone. Just sign in, and set a duration.

When you're ready to start sweeping your tweets, it costs just $29/year. The fee helps me keep the lights on, add new features, and fix bugs.

If you have questions, you can tweet me @pbmarcano.

Let's keep improving, leaving our past behind, and moving forward.

Our play fights would get heated and, occasionally, she would get hurt. Seeking to avoid trouble at all costs, I would do everything in my power to get her to laugh instead of cry.

I can’t count the amount of times I have been ferociously waiting for an app to load or a video to buffer.

Granted, this is pretty high up there on the list of my first world problems… but I have things to do and places to be!

Staring at the word “loading” leaves me helpless, impatient, and frustrated with your shitty app!

About a month ago, I was mindlessly scrolling on Amazon and reached what seemed to be end of Amazon’s “recommended” items.

For a second I thought Amazon ran out of semi-useless things to sell me. Then I quickly found myself spiraling down the nine circles of hell loading.

All the sudden, something made me giggle.

Beep-boop-beep…

Some saintly designer at Amazon knew reading the word “loading” would piss me off.

Instead of doing what countless others in the software industry do, this beautiful mind decided to turn my frown upside down.

Why doesn’t every error/status message do this?

Forgot your password? Click here

Could just as easily become…

Passwords suck, right? Forgetting one happens to the best of us. How about we take a second and get you sorted.

Designing around frustration seems like something obvious to get behind. Yet, every day I am still bombarded with boring, frustrating, and useless error/status messages.

If you want the people to enjoy your app, design for scenarios where things go wrong. Make error messages personable and friendly. Make people giggle.

If you can make someone laugh when they’re prepared to cry you will make their day. Heck, they may even write about it online!

Be like Amazon and beep-boop-beep people out of frustration and into happiness.

Yeah, well I noticed a recent change in that icon on my phone and in my web browser. After a little digging I had found this “Slate” article. It turns out, this icon is now different for Facebook’s users depending on where they live in the world. As I am currently in Europe, my notification’s icon now illustrates the other side of the Atlantic.

When companies spend time on little details just to make a little better experience for their users, I tend to genuinely enjoy it. I just thought I’d share the little things that make my day.