Services like TwitPic, twt.fm, yfrog have gained popularity fast and with good reason. They’re all quick and easy ways to share your media on Twitter.
What I don’t quite understand is why so many people, who really should know better, use them. These media sharing tools provide free hosting of your media, which is great, but with blogging platforms such as WordPress that let you store and share all your photos, music etc. on your own site, and let you benefit from all the things controlling your own site lets you benefit from…why use them?
One reason might be that actually setting up a WordPress.org (or other self-hosted publishing platform) blog isn’t all that straight forward for complete newbies. But then there’s obviously WordPress.com, and plenty of other hosted blogging platforms, that will have you up and running in no time. If you ever want to move off any of them, they should all provide a quick and easy way to export your all your posts and files.
The other reason might be that actually posting content to your WordPress blog can be a pain in the ass. With Twitpic and alike, you can use various Twitter clients and can even just email photos in to share them on Twitter. But thanks to a service which I’m frankly sick of promoting, called Posterous, you can email photos/audio/video/documents to your WordPress blog and then thanks to plugins from the likes of Ping.fm and others, tweet, post to facebook, friendfeed (and many many others) as soon as the post is published.
If Posterous isn’t something you’re keen on trying, then WordPress (.com and .org) have built in email functionality that will let you post to your blog via email.
Using this method. You’ll have complete control of the media, it’s on your site forever – no matter what startup gets acquired. It’s easily searchable. You have more ways and places to share the media. You’ll have all your own personal branding on the site because it’s all your design. You can add whatever you want around the media your sharing (your other social site links, announcements, I guess even ads). Of course, thanks to the mass of plugins available, you’ll also be able to choose what URL shorteners you want to use (which does matter), analytics tools, and I could go on.
My point being is. Whether you’ve come to accept it or not, this really is the age of personal branding. Every time you share a photo, video, song you enjoy, whatever – you’re adding to people’s perceptions of what you are like as a person. Why use another service when with hardly any extra effort, you can control where, when and how your media – and in turn, you – is shared and portrayed.
If you use Posterous to autopost to your blog, where do the files get stored? Don’t they just get stored on Posterous’s servers? In which case you’re back to square one.
Unfortunately the (free blog_press) list is full , and your project does slightly conflict with our agreement with Mobypicture
http://bliin.com/#item=t.3907
Your point is well taken and I agree in principal. I have recently become a Posterous addict and huge, huge promoter. Having said that, I still use TwitPic specifically for those “throw away” pics that I want to post for a one-off use and don’t want to pollute my blog with.
Agree with Jon. I don’t take many photos that I actually need for later. 90% of the photos I have online were randomly taken with my cell and posted via Pikchur (which scatters them across the web for me). I don’t really care about the safety of those “throw away” pics, but in my case they would be safe since they’re in like 10 different places.
On the other hand, you raise a valid point about Posterous. I use it all the time, it provides a short URL, and I think I can post via my mobile. Gonna have to try that :)
For me, twitter is in it’s niche because it’s ubiquitous and quick. Same with TwitPic/TwitVid – they’re meant to be used as a rapid and easy-to-get-to method of getting media uploaded and broadcast via twitter.
Zee I agree people will hopefully wake up soon to owning their own namespace on the web and then having services like posterous or ping.fm distributing their data to other social points. The benefit is that if any of these services disappear/bought/go offline in the future then I can still own my text/picture/video. People are being led blindly to use these disparate free services to store their data because its easy without thinking about the consequences. For example if you have a Flickr PRO account and decide not to renew the PRO account you will lose most of your photos. For example I have been on twitter for 2 years but I cannot access/search all of my tweets. etc.
By the way the easiest way I have to setup a wordpress.org site is via godaddy.com when I setup my own domain.press a few options and pay for the service and now I have my own wp.org site – samsethi.me
This is such a good, timely post! Owning your own space online, is so much more important than it used to be… It’s about branding, it’s about control, and it’s about leveraging what you online. Thanks for an honest take on this one :-)
Yaah, posterous!!
No further comment.
I don’t know if you know this, but when you post with Posterous, your content remains on their servers – it does not get uploaded to your self-hosted WordPress install.
Zee, I love wordpress too but for quick and dirty mashups of content I already have on youtube, flickr etc, and to throw in more than 140 characters, I built mashtweet.com which yes, is in it’s infancy, but out there for free all the same :-)
Most probably do it as a matter of convenience and don’t think about things like wordpress, which is much more practical in the long run.
Good article Zee. You’ve got me thinking. I’ve long been an advocate of avoiding 3rd-party off-site solutions, but I found myself drawn to Twitpic and Twitvid. Twitpic mostly because of their comments integration, which encourages people to tweet you about your pics. And Twitvid for the same, plus their YouTube crossposting, which seemed handy (but actually has been a hassle).
Your wake-up call has me thinking about finding ways to do these things on my WP-based site instead. I was already considering the Twitter/Facebook universal login for comments tool; I wonder if there is one that lets people automatically tweet their comments while posting them?
A thought for others about the “impermanent” pics thing…you could always use a category visibility plugin for WordPress, to hide your “twit pics” posts from the main views/lists on your blog. That way you still draw traffic to your site rather than TwitPics, but your regular blog visitors will barely see a difference, if at all.
I’m probably going to change my ways because of your post Zee, so you must be doing something right. :-)
I understand and can relate to your ideals of how media sharing should be, however it’s hard to trust the recommendations when it’s obvious that you don’t proofread your posts. Nothing defames a persons opinion like grammatical errors. Bettah chiggidee check yourself before you riggidee wreck yourself.
I have a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. I have a Posterous account. I have a Twitter account. The way I look at it, my blog is my home; Twitter is the local pub. I love Twitpic.
I don’t want to clutter up my home, but I do want to hang at the bar with my friends and share photos and stories of good times. For that reason, I don’t have an issue with using Twitpic, and it’s the very simplicity of it that is its strength.
Not everyone wants to blog; it’d time-consuming and you really need to be passionate about it if you want it to work. Twitpic (and others like it) offer a fast, free and fun way to share your stuff without the hassle of having to format in a blog post.
Many of the folks using services like Twitpic aren’t worried about “personal branding” – they’re more worried about sharing fun stuff with their friends. I advise and help clients monitor their brand for a living and I wouldn’t advise folks to not use a service that can help give them a more human approach. That’s what people are looking for – offer it however you feel fit.
I think that one should look at the circumstances of use (use cases) for all these tools. I would use twitpic and similar occasionally, for a picture that sits on my iphone and accompanies/illustrates a tweet. Why? It’s instantaneous, easy and straightforward, it will be gone in a few hours… it fits the volatile nature of twitter. And I would use flickr, posterous, or wordpress for a picture that comes on my blog/website and accompanies/illustrates a post. Why? It’s slightly more work, but it comes with functionality that allow tagging, content management, etc. and it will still be there next year (most probably) or even a decade from now (maybe).
Twitpic may disappear, and its content with it, but wordpress (should it disappear) may leave an opportunity to backup/export all your content…
@cdn
Sometimes the most obvious plan is sitting in front of you…but, due to other pressing projects, ideas, life you just never see it. As a matter of fact I recently read an article about why people should stop using flickr (picture sharing tool owned by Yahoo) it had more of a political slant on it. A very good point on their part regarding Yahoo & Chinese dissidents but that’s going off topic. Thanks for a great light bulb moment.
I agree in principle with what your post is suggesting.
I encourage everyone to brand their own name. Using their own server and domain.
HOWEVER, the honest reason why it’s very difficult is that such services like twitpic, yfrog, tweetphoto, pixli ect. ect. all have some sort of built in functionality into 3rd party social media apps such as Twitter, Seesmic, TweetDeck, ect. ect.
If a user is sharing their media sporadically on their mobile device, it’s not very ideal to exit out of the application, open up an email, or photogallery…select the photos you want, enter an e-mail address, title, content ect. ect. That’s not very intuitive at all, and in the age of mobile devices which lack keyboard to enter all this metadata….the solution which lets you share media with the least amount of screen clicks is always probably going to win.
If there were embedded app, 1 click solutions, that allowed you to upload a photo (to your personal server) Then a script on that server which takes that photo, once uploaded, creates a blog post, post to twitter, facebook ect. ect…That would make sense. But currently, there are not easy solutions like that on mobile platforms.
3rd party apps provide that functionality, unfortunately for the blogger, and website host, pre-determines which services they want to include in their apps.
I definitely agree with you in concept, and philosophy….however, the chain or process command it takes to simply share media isn’t as easy as 3rd party twitter apps makes it. So the 3rd party twitter apps win when it comes to sharing media, and the services who allow that media sharing possible reap the benefits.
Too many extra clicks and steps when trying to share media using your own domain and server, and not enough innovative ways to share it across platforms with minimal clicks, when the goal for most people is to get those photos out to facebook and twitter anyway, not simply their blog or website. People aren’t typically waiting on someone’s blog to click their shared photos, they most definitely do a majority of that type of lurking on facebook and twitter.
Great idea, great post, great conversation to spark, much appreciated.
This post is fucking lame as hell. WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?
I agree to an extent, but I personally don’t use TwitPic and my blog in the same manner. On my blog I craft posts and include good quality pictures to keep for the ages. To TwitPic I send poor quality images from my iPhone of where I am and what I’m doing, so that followers will see what’s up with me at the time. I wouldn’t want to spam my blog with that sort of content – it serves a different purpose than that of my blog, and I wouldn’t mind if it were to disappear some day.
I have written a TwitPic Exporter that will make it easy to grab all your pictures from them. now include an importer for Flickr, WordPress, MobyPicture and yFrog. Posterous importer will be coming in the next day or two as well.
http://export-twitpic.stevenbullen.com/
It’s a valid point, but, thankfully I’ve spoken to the team at Posterous and they’ll also ensure those files are available long after they’re acquired.
Additionally, you can of course use wordpress’ built in emailing tools.
But frankly, above all, my main point is the branding side. Have everything on your own site, in your control and reap the benefits of having it as such.
Thanks for stopping by Rah.
Do you not find though, that with these random photos that quite often they turn out to mean a lot more to you a few days, weeks, months, years down the line? I mean if they’re worthy of a tweet, there must be some significance no?
That’s why I set up a status blog http://status.zee.me and I put those kind of photos on there. This is the process if you’re interested http://thenextweb.com/2009/09/04/create-version-twitter-real-status-updates-replies-links-breaking-news/
That is exactly the point I was going to make: I only use twitpic for “disposable” pictures, that lose their relevancy as soon as they disappear behind the twitter horizon (which is generally less than a day).
This is exactly what I was thinking reading this. My blog is very niche (beauty) and on Twitter I am everything that I am as a person–PR, social media, mother, dater, beauty blogger, etc. So my pictures are sometimes personal and sometimes related to my blog. I use yfrog and Twitpic when they are disposable.
But this is a good post and something for me to think about going forward.
@ShannonNelson
And I see someone else made the point above. Whoops. :)
cheers for the comment Sam. Didn’t actually realise you could do it via goDaddy, very cool.
What a great idea.. maybe some programmer ought to come up with this! Hey when you find it let me know would be something to look into.