Category: Twitter
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)
Swine Flu: Google maps and Twitter panic
The weekend’s reports of an outbreak of Swine Flu originating in Mexico have created something of a stir on Twitter and done a very interesting job of highlighting some of the major differences between the real-time search system and the more established approach of Google.
On the one hand, Google has assimilated an interesting webpage on facts of the flu on their own and other people have created Google maps pinpointing all the confirmed cases worldwide. At the other end of the scale, the speed of response and democracy of search results on Twitter has produced something closer to mass panic.
There’s been a Chinese whispers effect whereby a host of tweets built around anecdotal evidence, to put it kindly, have produced a mixed bag of misinformation and hysteria. My personal favourites are the opportunist:
and the poetic:
There must be some interesting looking log cabins in that town.
To fan the flames of total ignorance, I’d suggest that this outbreak will have a similar effect as the bird flu a few years back. We’ll see it all over the news. They’ll be plenty of reported deaths but they’ll mostly be amongst the very old and the infirm and the WHO will get a grip in it soon enough.
Meanwhile, if you find yourself hot, sweaty and oinking uncontrollably, I suggest you get yourself down the docs pronto.
(via FP)
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?
Twitter at work with SpreadTweet
If you work in a big corporate office and you crave Twitter salvation, but it’s been banned by the small-minded IT department, then I’ve got the solution for you. Spreadtweet. It’s an interface for Twitter that looks just like Microsoft Excel.
It comes in several flavours – OSX Office, Office 2003 and Office 2007, and it uses Adobe Air for the backend, but it’s relatively speedy and fully operational as a Twitter client. The developer admits that it’s “probably not” legal, so grab it while you can.
SpreadTweet (via @bryonyb)
Twitter gets the 'all-clear' after a weekend of virus antics
In a metaphorical ‘get your own back’ situation, everyone’s favourite bird-themed microblogging website, Twitter, was assaulted by worms over Easter weekend. Four waves of assaults hit the site, with those infected spamming out a link to a Twitter clone called StalkDaily.
The creator of StalkDaily, 17-year-old American student Michael Mooney, has admitted he was responsible, saying:
“I really didn’t think it was going to get that much attention, but then I started to see all these stories about it and thought, ‘Oh, my God’.”
While the attack could have been considerably worse if it had been more malicious in intent, security experts said they were surprised it had even been possible on the site, as Facebook and MySpace saw similar assaults quite some time ago. Twitter has promised to conduct a ‘full review’ of what happened.
UPDATED: Google in talks to purchase Twitter
Google is in talks to acquire Twitter according to sources in a Tech Crunch article this morning. Negotiations have been believed to be at both late and early stages, so we can probably take from that that the stages are in fact somewhere towards the middle.
Google’s valuation of the microblogging platform is thought to be well in excess of the $250 million that Facebook offered a few month’s back. The important difference to this deal is in the payment plan.
Zuckerburg Inc. was looking to use overpriced Facebook stock for the majority of the bargain whereas Google is ready to pay in both cold, hard cash and more stable, publicly-valued shares.
The big questions surrounding the deal are about what Google plans on doing with Twitter and what founders of the service Evan Williams and Biz Stone want out of it too. Twitter represents a real-time search of news and events happening now whereas Google results give weight to pages according to when they were indexed and how many people link to them. If Google does go through with the deal, they would effectively own search but whether they would improve Twitter or leave it to rot is another matter.
For a bigger discussion of the ins and outs of this one, download the Tech Digest podcast.
(via Tech Crunch)
Twitter changes @replies to mentions
Twitter has changed the term “replies” to “mentions” for a reason of pure semantics. Before any hardcore tweet heads out there start freaking out, nothing has actually changed or very little anyway. All the same, let Uncle Dan take you through it step by step:
Notice a section of the Techdigest Twitter page on the right. We shall call this Exhibit A. Note how Exhibit A now reads “@techdigest” where is used to say “@replies”. It said that because before it would only pick up @replies if @whateveryourusernameis was written at the start of someone’s tweet, ignoring all the times your user name might feature later on in the message.
Eg: @techdigest is really cool – would be picked up
Just going to have a read of @techdigest – would not be.
So, Twitter has got wise to this and is now sensitive wherever you mention someone’s user name. So, to let us know, they’ve started calling them “mentions” instead of replies. Make a big difference to your life, that one? Here endeth the lesson.
(via Twitter Blog)
Twitter hiring staffer to look after celebrities
Everyone knows that fame gets you everything you could ever want (except love, but who the hell needs that?) but until recently the brightest and most beautiful among us had to deal with Twitter just like anyone else does.
Not for much longer. The microblogging company is hiring a “VIP Concierge” to look after the celebs using the service. Here’s what they’ve put under ‘job description’:
“We don’t have a description written for this yet, but the job is to be a “high touch” point of contact at Twitter for the burgeoning number of celebrities on the service. We want to make sure they’re happy, using the product effectively, etc.”
“This person is probably pretty junior (it won’t pay a lot) but hopefully familiar with working with “Hollywood types.” They should be tech savvy enough to answer questions and solve basic problems (though they can fall back on our tech support). And they should definitely present themselves (and the company) well on the phone and in person. They should be proactive but not pushy. “
“It might make sense for them to be in L.A. but to come up to SF often. Obviously this is a very sweet gig for someone. The challenge will be finding someone who is good at the schmoozing but also humble and a fit with our culture.”
It’s probably a wise move for a company who’ve seen much of their growth thanks to high-profile tweeters like Steven Fry and Philip Schofield. Does it sound like you, or someone you know? Go for it! And tell them we sent you.
Job Ad (via TechCrunch)
