I'm excited to announce a new project we launched today -  Twitter Tees by Threadless.  We've brought the Threadless crowdsourcing model for t-shirts to the Twitter
community.  Twitter Tees will feature notable tweets submitted and
voted on by Twitter users, with art direction and design of each shirt
by the in-house creative team at Threadless.  We've already gotten some nice coverage by Mashable, BrandWeek, and O'Reilly.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, originally reached out to us in early
January regarding some Twitter logo tees they were interested in
producing.  Here at Threadless, we had already been refining a strategy
to bring crowdsourcing to other vibrant communities, so the timing was
perfect.  In February, Biz invited us to speak to the Twitter team at
their San Francisco office about Threadless and crowdsourcing.  It was
great to exchange ideas with their team and they really liked our idea
for enabling any
Twitter user to submit and vote on tweets to make the best Twitter
Tees.  Once we decided to move forward, our team here at Threadless did
a great job taking this project from concept to live site in a very
short time.  The Twitter API provided a great platform for developing a richly integrated site, and Biz Stone and his colleague Maggie Utgoff were incredibly supportive.

Here's how it works.  After logging into
the site using your Twitter credentials, you can instantly access your
own tweets and submit them for consideration.  You can also nominate
others' tweets for consideration, and you can vote on any tweets
submitted to determine if they are worthy of being printed as a
Twitter Tee.  Importantly, in respect of your privacy, you must approve
any tweet of yours that someone else has nominated before it is
eligible for voting.  Also, in respect of your time/messaging
preferences, you can choose to approve all, deny all or review each
nomination on a case-by-case basis.  Tweets from protected Twitter
accounts are not eligible for nomination or submission.  Each week
we'll print two new Twitter Tees, based on community vote.  If your own
tweet is selected you will receive $500 and if you are first to
nominate a successful tweet you will receive $140.

We launched the site with four great Twitter-themed tees from existing tweets:

"I'm huge on Twitter" by @xenijardin

"140 is the new 420" by @mutgoff

"In space no one can hear you tweet" by @LouisTrapani

"The messaging system we didn't know we needed until we had it" by @biz

I
can't wait to see which tweets the community submits and votes up in
the coming weeks, but I expect them to be as diverse and varied as the
conversations happening constantly on Twitter.  Please check out the site and submit, nominate and vote on some tweets!  I'd love to get your feedback.