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"When Things Fall Apart, an experimental campaign launching Friday, deconstructs and reconstructs your Twitter avatar over three days when you donate $10 or more to the Red Cross. Using a visual language called Processing, your picture will be scattered and periodically rebuilt over 60 hours in 12-hour increments. \nWhen Things Fall Apart thematically mirrors the work the Red Cross does, rebuilding communities that have been shattered to pieces by natural disasters.\nThe campaign fits into Georgia Tech Professor Eric Gilbert's research on Twitter mobilization through changing profile pictures in both organic and orchestrated campaigns. Since people adopted green icons during the Iranian uprisings in 2009, cause campaigns have used profile pictures to generate awareness. \n\"I'm pretty fascinated by these campaigns, but they're also really easy to fake, at max requiring a very basic knowledge of Photoshop,\" Gilbert told Mashable. \"My hope was that if we inject serious computation into this can we get people to pay money and send it to a worthy cause.\" \n\nSEE ALSO: Red Cross Launches Social Media Disaster Response Center\nWith the help of a grad student, Gilbert wrote the code to build When Things Fall Apart. Gilbert approached the Red Cross, asking if he could officially partner with them on his project. They agreed and his site leads to an official Red Cross donation page.\nWhen Things Fall Apart has no expiration date in sight, so Gilbert anticipates a natural disaster could cause an influx of new participants.  \n\"I'm hopeful that this could work and I'm looking to leave it live for a long time,\" Gilbert says. \"Because it's not tied to a specific event, we're opening it up to the web and if there's a big disaster we'll be here to generate some money for the Red Cross.\"\nDo you notice social media profile picture campaigns? Do you think a crumbling avatar draws attention to what the Red Cross is doing? \n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/twitter-when-things-fall-apart/>