AUSTIN, Texas If a picture's worth a thousand words, a new Web service is giving Twitter users an entertaining way to make their 140-character mini-messages count for as much as possible.

FunTweet, unveiled here this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, automatically matches the text in Twitter messages to quirky animations and pictures.

Launched by Pleasonton, Calif.-based mobile content company FunMobility, FunTweet analyzes the text in a given message and uses keywords to come up with an appropriate image.

Once you go to FunTweet.it and sign in with your Twitter information, the free service matches each of your tweets to a picture. If you want any image to post on your Twitter page, you can select the image and it will appear as a link on your regular Twitter page for others to see.

Say you tweet your gripes about daylight savings time, FunTweet might generate an image of a cranky woman pointing at an alarm clock or a late-night partier still sleeping on the couch.

"FunTweet.it brings Twitter into a new visual dimension by making it possible to instantly add fun, relevant visuals to tweets from our huge visual database. Funtweet.it also turns anybody into a Twitter mash-up artist, giving people the power to visualize any tweet and then re-tweet it or share via Facebook," FunMobility CEO Adam Lavine told ABCNews.com.

Lavine said the service is powered by his company's FunMail Media Brain, an open content database that anyone, from artists to major studios and advertisers, can upload content to and tag.

Sometimes the Media Brain does a great job and picks a perfect picture, sometimes the images seem a bit off. But the service offers plenty of graphics, so if you don't like the first ones it chooses for you, you can hit "Try Again" to see other options.

In December, FunMobility launched FunMail, a free iPhone application that draws from the same Media Brain to illustrate text messages. The application, which Lavine said is used by about 100,000 people, makes it easy to send fun picture messages straight from your phone.
-- Ki Mae Heussner

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