Writer and designer Andy Clarke and developer Brian Suda have announced the “soft-boiled” launch of a simple site, TweetCC, to help users set their Creative Commons licensing for Twitter.

Clarke was writing a book, in which he was hoping to include some tweets (posts) and avatars from Twitter. His publisher told him, in order to do this legally, he would need to get permission from each Twitter user quoted in the book.

Suda teamed with Clarke to develop an application where users could license their tweets under a Creative Commons license, “mak[ing] it easy for other people to find out if and how they can use” your Twitter posts.

To make your Twitter things available for re-use, just send this message to @TweetCC: “@tweetcc: I license my tweets under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication license.”

There are other types of Creative Commons licenses you might consider, such as several Attribution licenses – Share, Share Alike, No Derivatives, Non-commercial, and so on. The license types and what each means are explained here.

You can find out whether someone on Twitter has CC -licensed their tweets here (but you’ll want to change the username= from my username, to the Twitter-er you’re looking for.).