This week’s Friday Focus features designs with pretty little birds in them. (No, this isn’t another collection of Twitter-related sites—only two of them are.)

Some thoughts about Twitter’s marketing potential amid the numbers game.

Backgrounds are so called for a reason. They’re meant to support and complement instead of attract and distract. This week’s featured sites, however, provide a whole other level of interactivity and usefulness to backgrounds. You decide if they’re a good idea or not. Either way, they’re interesting concepts that can only be executed on the Web, so, enjoy!

Using Twitter? Here are more things to do with it.

Five design celebrities to follow on Twitter.

Integrating the power of Twitter with your existing website.

Twitter has just turned three but it it’s still the most talked about webapp in ages. That’s because people are constantly coming up with ways to extract, arrange, and present its data. Let’s take a look at some nicely designed 3rd-party websites that harness its power.

This week’s featured designs have great personalities and stand to remain etched in your brain thanks to generous use of illustrations. You’ll definitely want to meet them!

Transparency, translucency, opacity: we have designs that are peeking through this week on Friday Focus.

Here’s a larger-than-usual Friday Focus for this week, featuring simple yet beautiful designs that just work. Four site types (blog, portfolio, static, e-commerce) that do a standout job of making an impression.

Are you neglecting your blog due to too much time spent on Twitter? Are you showing you tweets on your blog because of this, to save it from totally dying on you, or considering to perhaps? It can be done, but you need to do it right.

If you haven’t heard by now, TinyURL has gone down. The popular URL shortening service went down sometime in the night, and has yet to come back up yet. With so many services depending on the free TinyURL service, I am surprised that it has been down for so long.

Just a few points on why you shouldn’t trust a free service without making sure there are systems in place to deal with service outages.

Update: TinyURL is back up and running with no word excusing the outage.