Category: Web 2.0
How to: post photos on Twitter, including a comparison of Tweetphoto and Twitpic
If you’re even the newest of Twitter users, you’ll have seen people posting photos of stuff going on around them. In fact, it’s one of the most popular uses of the site and can often scoop real news organisations, like in the case of the plane that crashed into the Hudson river.
This guide will show you a few of the options available to you if you’d like to become a ‘citizen journalist’ too, or maybe if you just spot something remarkable happening and want to share it with your friends.
Twitpic
By far the most popular way of uploading pictures to Twitter is a website called Twitpic. It’s very simple – users can log into their site on their PC or mobile phone and upload images. You can then add a short caption, which gets posted to your Twitter feed alongside a link to the image.
Better still, thanks to Twitpic’s API you’ll find that many third party Twitter clients will come with Twitpic support built in, so you won’t even need to go to the website.
Twitxr
The unpronounceable Twitxr is an application for the iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets that’ll let you upload pictures from your mobile phone, publish them on Twitter and varous other social networking and microblogging sites, and automatically add geotagging data from a GPS unit.
It’s also available as a Java application for Nokia S60 and Motorola handsets, and in a worst case scenario you can visit m.twitxr.com to upload a pic or even just email it, attaching the picture.
SnapTweet
If you’re a Flickr user and want your account to be integrated with your Twitter account, then you’ll like SnapTweet. It’s a service that takes your Flickr RSS feed of pictures and then sends a Twitter update out whenever you add anything new.
People who upload to Flickr from their mobile phones on a regular basis will find this a very easy and convenient way of sharing photos on the site, though if you haven’t got a Flickr account, or a capable mobile phone, then it’s a bit of a hassle to set up.
TweetPhoto
Lastly, TweetPhoto is the new kid on the block for image sharing on Twitter. It keeps all the functionality of its main competitor, TwitPic, but adds more info like who’s recently viewed or favourited a photo.
There’s also a prominent option to retweet photos, which should help the virality of the service. It’ll post your photos to Facebook, too, if you’d like it to. From your phone you can either visit the Tweetphoto website to upload pics, or email them to a unique address.
Conclusions
There’s a multitude of options for you to post pictures to Twitter from your mobile phone, so if you see something exciting on the street then you’ve got no excuse not to post it. Let’s not have 80 pictures of your cat, though, yeah?
If you have any incredible shots that you’d like to share with us, then now that you know how to upload them to Twitter, send them our way at @techdigest.
Twitter is just a passing fad, claims research
Research from Nielsen Online suggests that Twitter might have problems with ‘stickiness’ – with retaining users that give it a try. Its statistics suggest that more than 60% of Twitter users fail to return a month of using it.
In fact for most of the past twelve months, Twitter has had difficulty keeping more than 30% of its users after a month, though the entry of Oprah Winfrey has helped. Facebook and MySpace, before their explosive growth periods, had nearly double the retention rates that Twitter currently faces.
What would be interesting to see would be how many people come back later on. It’s been my experience of the site that people sign up and bag their name, then ignore it until lots of their friends are using it, at which time they return.
Still, it’s worrying news for the site which needs to start crossing over sooner, rather than later. Intense media coverage in the UK has helped, but it’s still not obvious to many new Tweeters how the site works, or its Twittiquette.
(via Nielsen Wire)
Microsoft launches Vine – Twitter for emergencies
Microsoft has a new software product called Vine that it’s beta testing with a small group of users in Seattle. It’s a location-aware social networking app that lets people share information in emergencies. As a result, the focus is on ease-of-use and robustness of the network in tough conditions.
The Windows-only program sits on your desktop and gathers data from local news sources and other users. You can post short ‘alerts’ or longer ‘reports’ to it via SMS and email, and it integrates with Facebook. Soon it’ll integrate with Twitter, too.
Emergency management officials are reportedly very excited about having a new tool to inform people in disaster situations, but Microsoft also says it could be used by football teams or schools to notify of closures or schedule changes.
If you live in Seattle and want to help Microsoft beta test it, then you can sign up at http://www.vine.net. If not, sit tight and with any luck it’ll be available in the UK within the next couple of years.
Vine (via Mashable)
Facebook builds a door into the walled garden
Facebook has long been criticised for being a ‘walled garden’ where users can frolic freely with their data on the site but do absolutely nothing with it elsewhere. That should be changing this afternoon as the site opens up far more useful data to its users.
External developers will now, crucially, be able to extract real-time information from the site and use it to build services on their own websites. For example, someone could build a site that tracks ‘trending’ words in status updates and wall posts, much like Twitter’s ‘trending topics’ function.
It’s a little trickier to open up than something like Twitter, thanks to the intricate privacy settings that each user is able to set. It’s likely that at first it’ll simply take anyone out who’s got any kind of privacy set other than the default, but that’ll probably evolve over time.
(via Guardian)
Facebook voters say yes to more content control
The ballots are in, the votes have been counted and the titchy 600,000 out of 22 millions Facebook users have voted in favour of terms and conditions giving them more control over content posted on the social networking site.
The turn out was supposed to have sway if it represented a minimum of 30% of the Facebook population but it seems they underestimated the utter apathy of the internet population. Three percent managed to click an opinion. All those who couldn’t be bothered, raise your hand now. Yep, me too.
(via PC Pro)
Things You Should Not Twitter
People often tweet stuff they regret but beware, because it could now be preserved for posterity on a website set up exactly for the purpose. ThingsYouShouldNotTwitter.com contains screengrabs of Tweets that are a little bit on the iffy side, like people saying they’re going to cheat on their partners, or tweeting about watching porn.
Some examples include one user promising to masturbate on his roommate’s bed, a girl saying she’s going to ‘look for’ her boyfriend’s best friend, and plenty of people expressing how much they hate their boss.
The usernames are stripped out, but it’s pretty easy to track down the users responsible. The site’s creator says he made it to highlight how much personal info people share, and to try to get people to think twice about what they’re Tweeting.
Have you ever Tweeted something you’ve regretted? Send us a link at @techdigest. We won’t tell the whole world about it, promise…
What happens to your user name when you die?
User names are starting to become an issue. One’s identity online was never really a problem beyond trying to get the top result in a Google search – not an easy feat if you’re name’s John Smith but as Dan or Daniel Sung, depending upon how I’m feeling, I’ve always enjoyed the luxury of being somewhere near the top.
The trouble is, that my name’s not so rare that I always get my choice of user name on all the big services out there. Most people’s aren’t but, again, that was never really a problem when it was just about e-mail addresses, but now that Google profiles becoming all the rage and services like Twitter actually affect my career, suddenly, my juvenile choices of [email protected] and [email protected] aren’t very useful any more.
I can’t get [email protected]. It’s too late, unless I want to add a bunch of underscores and a three digit number, and because of that I can’t get the vanity URL I’m after. Regardless of whether [email protected] has actually clued up to the possbility of his http://www.google.com/profile/dansung address (and he hasn’t because the link’s dead) the fact is that I can’t have it because I don’t have the [email protected] user name in the first place. Instead, I have to be satisfied in my petty revenge that enough spambots should have picked up his credentials by now and sent a few thousand messages to clog up his account.
So, how do I go about getting my name back, aside paying the guy for it? What if it’s some kid who never uses the account? What if the owner of [email protected] is dead? Any chance then?Well, I seem to remember in the terms and conditions when I signed up to hotmail that if you don’t use your account for 60 days or so, then MSN terminates it, and, in fact, having asked around all the majors – Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Twitter, that does seem to be largely the case. Here’s how it runs.
Gmail
Google was very helpful on the matter, answering my question directly and then pointing me towards the supporting terms and conditions.
Google will terminate your account in accordance with the terms of service if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months is the phrase I was looking for along with the fact that people can actively delete their accounts.
Now, the tricky part is that, although the user names will become freed up, it will only happen after an unspecified time period and I’ve no idea whether that’s a matter of days, months or years. Still, there is some hope for [email protected] to eventually arrive at its rightful owner.
Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! was also most accommodating. The answer was very different though. It seems, with their service, that once your name has gone, it’s gone forever. As it stands, inactive accounts are not terminated and will lie idle indefinitely.
On the plus side, they did launch Ymail just last year, so I might be in for a shout at bagging that one while the service is fresh. Yep, all mine. Eat that one [email protected].
MSN
No reply back from MSN as yet but I’ll stick with that 60-day account termination I remember from back in the day. No word on whether they recycle the addresses but I’m infuriated to see that I’ve only got a choice between hotmail.co.uk and live.co.uk with all .coms presumably available to those in the States or behind proxy servers of some sort, or, in fact, those with some other way round which I have, as yet, to work out.
Accounts that are inactive for more than 6 months may be removed without further notice
That’s what Twitter has to say about things, but notice the use of “may” rather than “will”. I would assume that Twitter does recycle user names, though, because they’re hot on name squatting. Go and have a look at the whole section dedicated to it if you don’t believe me.
The catch is that I happen to know of a chap desperately trying to get his user name in full knowledge that its current owner has done sod all with the account for well over the six month period. He has petitioned Twitter but they’ve done nought about it. All mouth and no trousers it seems.
The trouble is that the internet is still young; an adolescent really. It’s only now that this kind of thing is becoming an issue and, given the surprise of most of the press officers when I called, it’s something that we the users are realising a lot faster than the big web players.
So, there’s a few ways this can go. Either they get wise to this and realise that they need to start releasing user names or they get wiser and start charging some kind of premium for them. That was Facebooks toe in the water this morning. I wonder how well that would go down if Google tried the same?
So, what happens to your user name when you die? Well, that depends. For now, it’s very possible you can take it with you to the grave. Then, it seems my choices are either begging Google for some kind of alert service for when my name is released or a cash offer to the current owner. If you’re listening [email protected], how does fifty quid grab you?
YouTube's content ID system – copes with volume, but not pitch changes
An enterprising techy in the Computer Science department at Rochester University, NY, has undertaken an investigation to find out exactly how much you have to mangle audio tracks before YouTube’s content identification system can’t recognise them any more. The findings are quite interesting.
For starters, he learnt that despite YouTube still easily recognising when a song’s volume is massively increased or decreased, it can’t cope with any pitch scaling beyond 5% or so. Also, interestingly, it only seems to recognise the first 30 seconds or so of a track.
The full analysis is right here, and there’s some fantastic comments on the white noise test video, here. Also interesting is that despite infringing copyright on the website 35 times and, at once point, 15 times in an hour, the account hasn’t been banned or removed.
YouTube testing real-time chat
Video-sharing site YouTube has been increasing the ‘social network’ aspects of the site gradually over the years, but it’s just taken a big step towards that by the announcement that it’s testing a social chat layer over videos.
Users will be able to talk to their friends while watching videos, and you’ll be able to see what videos they’re watching. You can also recommend videos in real-time. It’s still a little clunky, but TechCrunch has a full review on their website.
(via TechCrunch)
Facebook polls users on whether they'd pay for vanity URLs
Social networking goliath Facebook is considering offering paid-for vanity URLs to users. It would mean that, for a fee, you’d be able to get Facebook.com/whateveryoulike.
The URLs might go through a bidding process, so that whoever bids the highest gets access to a particular shortcode. The site currently only offers them to selected high-profile users to encourage them to use the site more.
Most sites usually take a ‘first-come, first-served’ approach to usernames, but that’s resulted in many companies having trouble getting their trademarks because they’re being squatted on by other users. Companies that try and shift the squatters often gain intense criticism.
Would you pay for a vanity URL on Facebook? If it wasn’t too expensive, I think I might. Let us know your thoughts on Twitter – message @techdigest.
(via AllFacebook)
