Foursquare.com is get­ting gold: hype-searching geeks are mov­ing on, and these days their favorite URL is formspring.me: it’s a really sim­ple q-and-a plat­form — kind of like Twit­ter, but with­out the 140 char­ac­ter limit. The ser­vice lacks a lot fea­tures, it’s still in a pretty early stage, which didn’t keep me from reg­is­ter­ing though: formspring.me/datadirt.

The setup just takes a minute: like on Twit­ter, there’s the avatar pic, the home­page URL, a short descrip­tion and that’s it. When it comes to eye candy, formspring.me offers a cou­ple of tem­plates, but the more brand-aware user can also upload their own back­ground pic — now in 2 min­utes, because I’ve com­piled a Photoshop-template that speeds up the process of cre­at­ing a cus­tom form­spring tem­plate a lot.

form­spring Back­ground Template

Unlike Twit­ter, there is no side­bar on form­spring — the main con­tent area mea­sures 752 pix­els includ­ing the bor­der. Con­sid­er­ing 1024-pixel-screens, that leaves about 120 pix­els for a vis­i­ble left side­bar. The height of the top header is 103 pix­els — I used these mea­sure­ments for the tem­plate file.

The zip archive con­tains two files: a lay­ered Pho­to­shop file with all the ele­ments in sep­a­rate lay­ers plus descrip­tion inside the file (don’t for­get to delete the descrip­tion layer before export­ing!). The back­ground tem­plate works on res­o­lu­tions from 1024 to 2000 pix­els. After recol­or­ing the tem­plate, insert­ing your logo and chang­ing the text, delete the last layer an export for web. I also included a gif-file for non-Photoshop users, which only has the lay­out squares, col­ored in dif­fer­ent shades of gray:

formspring-background-template.zip [right mouse-button and “save as”]

This is the gif-Template:

How to buzz formspring.me

The ulti­mate guide for har­ness­ing the “power” of this new plat­form is quite short: ask inter­est­ing and funny ques­tions, give help­ful and/or inspir­ing and/or funny answers (prefer­ably all at once). Always believe in the power of social media

There’s not much more yet, as the appli­ca­tions leaves a lot to be desired: I would miss the RSS feed if Ger­ald hadn’t built a mash-up replace­ment But search­ing for folks man­u­ally really sucks — c’mon guys, I though a Gmail/Facebook friend search was web 2.1 basic stan­dard these days?

At least there’s some cross-posting involved — users can link there Tum­blR, Twit­ter, Face­book and blog­ger accounts and choose the cross-postings on a per-answer basis. From an SEO point of view I like the blog­ger inte­gra­tion — but beware: if your run mul­ti­ple blogs using one blog­ger account, form­spring doesn’t let you choose, it seems to pick the newest blog. I set up formspring.blogspot.com as my aggre­ga­tion page.

formspring.me allows for anony­mous ques­tions, which makes it a great tool for “dif­fi­cult” top­ics — and there’s no spam dan­ger involved yet, as users have to man­u­ally approve every new ques­tion. Let’s see if the ser­vice can make it past the first hype. If you always secretly believed that 140 chars are *just not enough*, you might like this. Ask me why:

formspring.me/datadirt

Update
This is what other blog­gers say about formspring.me:

• Formspring.me — Adding Anony­mous Ques­tion Boxes on KillerStartups
• on ForeverGeek
• stor­m­grass about formspring