Twitter is clearly a phenomenon. Its growing so fast, and in so many interesting ways, its hard to keep up with. One of the most pleasing aspects of the communities it is fostering so far is their willingness to make a contribution.

The charitable aspects surrounding Twitter became a lot clearer over the last couple of months as the Twestival event launched, and took on a life of its own. More than 200 cities worldwide ran charity events for Twestival, which raised over $250k for charity:water. One of the leading lights of the organising committee – I like to think of her as the chief freecruiting officer- was Amanda Rose.

Just over a week ago it dawned on me that the chinposin platform we built last year would be perfect for Red Nose Day. Why? Because if people are going to use the official Digital Red Nose creator to create Twitter avatars like so…

Then why not create a wall of these Red Noses? So we did:

http://rednosin.chinposin.com/

My mate Chris Dalby, wordpress and twitter avatar maven, wrote the app. I just waved my hands incessantly.

What does all this have to do with Twitter? Well for one – crowdsourcing really works. Having volunteered to help, we were nearly derailed when it turned out that Comic Relief couldn’t host MySQL and PHP – the very platforms our app needed. We found out last Friday just before 12. By 7pm we had a few offers of hosting space in place- but the obvious choice was the Memset, which is one of the UK’s greenest hosting companies, and it is run by a female entrepreneur… Kate Craig-Wood. It was important we had dedicated hosting in case someone like Jonathan Ross or president elect of Twitter, Stephen Fry, pointed at us. No such luck… yet.

So the application is up and running. Its Thursday afternoon now. This has all been fun, if very time-consuming. I think my CSR whuffie is through the roof right now, and of course I can sleep well.

The service couldn’t be easier to use.

1. Visit the official Digital Red Nose Creator site.
2. Upload your newly minted avatar picture to your Twitter profile.
3. follow @rednosin on twitter
4. Visit the Red Nose Wall

Do something funny today. We have.

note: if you want to participate but creating your own red nose avatar please do, but make sure you make a contribution to Comic Relief and Red Nose Day if you do. All of the target charities are for kids, and this is one of the UK’s biggest charity events of the year.