Tag Archives: popular images

Using Twitter like Instagram for photo sharing with the iPhone – TwitPic has an app for that

A bunch of us was wondering why Twitter didn’t do more for photo sharing on the mobile years ago. There was a couple outside apps produced but the twitter apps never did more than let you add a photo or access photos in tweets via three taps. When Instagram hit the market, we felt it was a sign we were right and Twitter lost that game.

Now, a free solution from TwitPic has showed up to help you take photos, do a bit of editing, then post to your twitter stream.

After you snap a photo, or import from your iPhone photo library, TwitPic provides a few filters and image editing tools. These are from the Aviary free tools collection that developers can embed in their apps. Not sure why the app doesn’t use the full offering from Aviary. When the image is as you like, ‘Done’ takes you to a screen to add your 140 characters then post for all to see on Twitter.

Photos that are posted to Twitter can be seen in a scrollable, arranged by either Timeline (folks your following) and Popular. TwitPic does crop the images in this view so you see just part of the whole. Thus, you have a limited view and still have a extra tap to see the full image. The ‘profile’ icon in the upper right corner takes you to view your profile, images you have posted and comments on those images.

Select a photo in the stream to see it full size. If you do nothing for a bit or tap the screen, the upper/lower info bars disappear for a unrestricted view of the image.

When viewing an image, you can see in the lower right corner how many people have commented on it. Tap that area to open up the comments to add your thoughts and read text from others. There is another oval in the upper right corner of the screen, selecting it does nothing. TwitPic is a bit of a head scratcher where so much is possible but looks rushed to get out the door. Some people will post it’s a clean interface, I’m sticking with my feeling that it’s half done.

iPhone photo social sharing on StreamZoo… a different experience with gamefication

Unrelated to the Instagram and Facebook deal, I do actually play with a lot of other iPhone photo sharing services. Most don’t have huge quantities of people sharing, many have very few features, and everyone has something that makes them unique.

For StreamZoo, it is about a lot of features but no requirement to use them. There are points available for posting pictures, points when people like your photos, points when someone messages you and points when you like other people’s photos. Of course there are people that abuse the gathering of points… let them.

StreamZoo has the usual overview of Popular photos, as well the ability to see Leaderboards for high points fellow StreamZoo users. A nice touch is being able to see streams of photos. Streams = Hashtags on photos. I noticed in the beginning that the majority of the posts where from Android phones, but everyone is playing nice having fun as all photos are posted equal.

Taking a photo with StreamZoo or importing from your iPhone’s photo library gives you the option to edit with filters and tuning tools. From your ‘homepage’, you are informed there are new likes or messages via the Activity button turning red.

There is badges for all sorts of things… mostly in the area of number of likes for photos you have in different streams.

All of the viewing, commenting and messaging that can be done via the iPhone app can also be done via the Web interface. Within the iPhone app, you can see and overview of your uploaded photos, information around your followers, points and quantities of uploads, streams (tags) and badges. While you can follow individuals and the photos they are sharing, StreamZoo is really more about keeping an eye on streams on a subject.

Adding a title and description for every photo can be done prior to finishing the upload. Adding tags will allow people to see the photos in Streams. Since you took the time to edit the photo in StreamZoo, you can share directly out to other social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr directly.