Twitter did some Spring cleaning – stale accounts pruned?

Black Holes

While doing my typical searches for new and interesting people on Twitter to add to the flow, I noticed something indicative of Spring cleaning. You see, when you search Twitter, you usually get pages of people who haven’t updated in a year or accounts with zero updates – ever – and six months stale.

None of those cases seem to be true for my latest search results. There are a couple accounts with no updates in a year, but they’ve got a lot of updates, so they’d likely not be pruned. Either Twitter created a better search algorithm (unlikely, since the results are haphazard and not chronological) or they pruned the dead accounts (makes a lot of sense – I myself got an old account). When I’ve worked at community driven companies, we’ve done plenty of account trimmings.

Twitter doing prunings makes a lot of sense. This is a benefit to the user base, and a huge benefit to Twitter’s load. If this is truly the case, you might do a search for your favorite name about now… And if it isn’t, at least rejoice in a better mechanism to find the people you’re looking for.

SnapTweet – a Twitter photo service review

To date I have tried three services. Twitxr, TwitPic, and now SnapTweet

SnapTweet Logo

The exploring of Twitter integrated photo services continues… Today’s post is on SnapTweet, a service working towards announcing Flickr image uploads via Twitter updates.

Before continuing, here’s my philosophy on how a perfect Flickr/Twitter integration works:

  1. Images posted to Flickr are optionally announced on Twitter.
  2. No additional account required – either Twitter or Flickr is used for authentication.
  3. Do not attempt to own the content. It’s ok to own distribution. Images on Flickr. Tweets on Twitter. Render wherever. That’s how consumers what their content.

Summary

For the most part, SnapTweet fits my requirements. There are bugs and gotchas with their implementation, but this is an ideal service for many folks. SnapTweet is tailored for the person who spends time in Flickr and wants announcements sent via Twitter. It is not for the person who Twitters all day and uses Flickr as a repository (me). A pretty neat feature is the direct message to send a link to the latest image on Flickr.Continue Reading

How to post images to Twitter and Flickr at the same time from an iPhone

Sweet - TwitPic + http://flick.com/photos/solyoung works great from the iPhone.

How to is after the jump

With all the web services and photo sharing systems, I’m amazed an integration of Flickr and Twitter hasn’t already happened. Twitxr came out and claimed compatibility in Dave Winer’s scripting.com comments, but it never actually worked. I’ve wanted a way to post a pic to Flickr and have it announced on Twitter right away. Nada.

I love to shoot pics on my iPhone and post them immediately. Live photo streams are terrific! Flickr makes it easy by allowing you send to an email to a pre-defined email address. All you do is send an email with a photo as an attachment to your Flickr upload email address.

Now TwitPic is offering a service for Twitter users just like Flickr’s service, but they store the photo and send an announcement to Twitter with a link. Whatever you put in the subject line of the email is set as your update in Twitter.

Combining these two services is easy. Just send an email to both services at the same time and the pic will be posted in both places. The subject line of the email will be set as your update in Twitter and as the title of the pic in Flickr.

If the above didn’t already give you the ‘Ah HA!’ feeling, here are the precise instructions (iPhone specific, but works with any email capable phone):Continue Reading

What you miss in the flow

Meeka telescope Towers Numar.jpg

(interior picture from The Towers of Numar, by Michael Gagne)

It’s been almost two weeks since I started using Twitter as a primary source of news, links, and other fascinating bits of information. The approach has been awesome and I’ve discovered a ton of people and sites which I now return to. It’s been eye opening.

But I’ve been missing sites previously frequented. The time I’ve spent in the flow cut in to time spent reading feeds and visiting sites. And while my Google Reader feeds are grossly limited compared to the nearly 5,000 people I follow on Twitter, there is still some attachment and familiarity that goes missing.

I share my Google Reader items as a feed (RSS) or on a page (HTML), and of course it’s aggregated on my FriendFeed. I am ‘sol‘ on Twitter.

All incoming Twitters are saved and searchable in Gmail

I came by this as a latent side effect from switching to my flow method of using Twitter. It seems a lot of people want a quick and easy way to save their Twitter stream and be able to search it later…

To do this, you need to set up Twitter so you’re getting (or also getting) your updates via a GTalk/Gmail account. It’s very easy:

First – set up Chat in Gmail

1. If you don’t have a Gmail account, get one! After logging in, go to “settings” and hit the “Chat” tab.
GMail Chat Tab
2. Choose to “Save chat history in my Gmail account”.
3. Save this setting.

Second – set up Twitter to send notices to your Gmail account

1. In your Twitter account, go to “Settings” -> “Phone & IM”.
2. Enter details for your Gmail account.
Twitter IM Settings
3. Save the settings.
note: Only updates from Twitterers you follow and are selected for IM updates will be sent to your Gmail account.

Last – Log in to Gmail and keep that browser open

Log in

1. Choose to Sign into chat. Your Twitter updates will start arriving in Gmail.
2. Keep a tab or window open. If you log out of Gmail, or close the browser or tab, the updates will stop arriving since Twitter only sends updates to users that are logged in. Simply keep a browser tab open (very easy to do if you’re already a Gmail aficionado).