Add Graphs (or Doodles) to Your 140 Characters With Sparktweets

Part of the brilliance of Twitter is the brevity of 140 characters. While there are ways of getting around the restriction -- with programs like TwitLonger or XLTweet both of which will tweet the first 120 or so characters and then link to the rest of your message -- much of the fun comes from finding creative ways of staying within the limit.

At the Wall Street Journal, editorial project manager Brian Aguilar and outreach manager Zach Seward joined forces to adapt sparklines, or "small, high-resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images," into the Twittersphere. You can find directions on how to create your own "Sparktweet" on Seward's website, where he's also collecting some of his favorite ones using the hashtag #Sparktweets. While there's still some tweaking to be done, many have started to create their own.

Some of our favorites are below. Most tweeters stick to the graph model, though others, like @algarcia, use this opportunity to doodle. In the fourth tweet, you can see his perfect iTunes equalizer setting.