The Next Web

Flickr’s Flick.rs (auto post to Twitter) not taking off, yet.

By Boris
June 27, 2009
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It has been a few weeks since Flickr launched a new feature which allows you to send a tweet to Twitter every time you post a photo. As a loyal Flickr user this has been a feature that I have been waiting/wishing/praying for! Mobypicture, Twitpic and yFrog all work fine too of course but I wanted to my photos to be on Flickr. Not scattered on the web.

I would rather have my photos and the views and comments to go with them in one place.

I would have imagined that once Flickr (easily the most popular Photo sharing website, especially among the tech-savvy early adopter crowd) would start offering Twitter notifications thousands of Mobypicture, Twitpic and yFrog users would start abandoning those services in favor of Flickr.

So far however none of this is happening. Granted, the service is officially still in ‘Semi-Private beta’ but as far as I can tell anyone can access and enable it. I have and have been using the service since it launched. It works flawlessly, fast and it is extremely easy to use.

You authenticate at Twitter via Flickr, get an email address to email to and you are done. Takes less then 30 seconds.

A search at twitter reveals how little people are actually using the feature. As you can see Flickr uses their own URLS shortener: http://flic.kr. A search for ‘flic.kr’ will demonstrate how many people are using it. Right they seem to top out at about 20 posted photos per hour. Mobypicture and Twitpic seem to have at least 20 new uploads every 20 seconds.

Flickrs Flick.rs (auto post to Twitter) not taking off, yet.

Where Twitpic is the second most visited Twitter Service online, according to my own spreadsheet, Flic.kr now ranks last in our list of 35 services. I asked Mathys van Abbe, founder and CEO of Mobypicture how he feels about Flickr entering his market. His reply, via email: “Good to see Flickr/Yahoo is finally picking up on Twitter. The Yahoo CEO said Twitter was a hype… ;) I don’t really think the general quality of the phone cam shots matches the Flickr image and their core objectives.”

He might have a point. Flickr has always been focused on high quality photography. People don’t just dump all their photos on Flickr but tend to strive for quality. You could say that Flickr is about Photography and the other services are about snapshots. For Flickr this new feature might just be that; a small feature to keep Twitter users happy but not something they plan to promote.

We will keep a close eye on how that develops over the following months.

 

  • The ability to take a photo from a good quality phone cam (I use an N82) and send it direct to flickr and then use one site to post the photo with text direct to blogs and twitter is quite powerful in my opinion.

    I would like an auto-post feature that worked with tags. If I give a photo a certain tag, I want it autoposted to twitter.
  • Well, you have a different email address for each Flickr function. I have three Addresses in my AddressBook:

    1: Flickr General - posts photo to flickr
    2: Flickr Blog - posts photo to flickr and posts a blogpost to my WordPress post
    3: Flickr Twitter - posts photo to flickr and sends out a tweet

    I take a photo, type flickr in the address field and then select one of three options. Couldn't be simpler...
  • In the Apps and API era email upload isn't the sexiest thing around, me thinks. When Flickr will make a Flic.kr iPhone/S60/Android/WM6 app, usage will taake off. :)
  • Hi,

    have you ever imagined just to say whatever you wantet to say, instead of typing?

    http://speepo.com/listen/c0eaccb3d2fbf485b764c2...

    greetings

    sven
  • I upload way too many photos to flickr, I have almost 20,000 photos on it and a small part of it is public, but it's still a lot and I would consider it to be major spamming to actually tweet about every photo I upload. I usually am a little annoyed with too many photo tweets in a row already, so don't give people any ideas please.. :)

    Also, most of my friends are behind, as usual, so they don't use twitter or flickr. They do use hyves and facebook, which is why mobypicture is a good choice for my daily iPhone snapshots.
  • Well, you have a different email address for each Flickr function. I have three Addresses in my AddressBook:

    1: Flickr General – posts photo to flickr
    2: Flickr Blog – posts photo to flickr and posts a blogpost to my WordPress post
    3: Flickr Twitter – posts photo to flickr and sends out a tweet

    I take a photo, type flickr in the address field and then select one of three options. Couldn’t be simpler…
  • Max
    In 2007 something like this was already launched called autopostr.com it works by just adding a # to the title of your flickr photo or the tag autopostr. It works really great.
  • Emailing my photos of 12-20 mb each, about 100 each day, sometimes less, sometimes more, is not an option. I use the uploadr for it- the Aperture plugin doesn't work properly anymore in my opinion.
  • I use flickr to host 'proper' photos as well as hosting 'snaps' for two photo blogs I run. I've already set it up like Steve so that emailing (from my N82!) triggers it to send to my blog. In turn, twitterfeed polls my blog and posts the blog entry to twitter. Sure, it's a double step but when I set it up it was the only way I could find. After the one-time effort of setting it up its seamless to me anyway. And it drives traffic to my site rather than straight to flickr.

    FWIW, the two photoblogs are
    --> interesting stuff snapped on my mobile: http://mymobilestream.blogspot.com
    --> travel snaps: http://teddybok.blogspot.com
  • shaun
    For Twitter automation i've got to say Twimbo from iq143.com was one of the easiest to set up and one of the more intelligent bots.

    It only took a few minutes to set up and it's currently priced low for early adopters. My traffic has doubled since using it and I now have a great following on Twitter. I've even had new paying customers as a result! Winner.
  • i like twitter so much, but still get confused how to auto-post my blog post to twitter.
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