SnapTweet makes it easy to share your latest Flickr photo on your Twitter stream. The signup is simple…enter your Twitter credentials and your Flickr user and you’re all set! When you’re ready to post, just send a direct messsage to the snaptweet user on Twitter. You can do this from your phone or the Twitter home page by typing:
D snaptweet
This idea was borne out of my need to post photos to Twitter from my iPhone. It was easy enough to email the photo up to Flickr, however getting the photo to Twitter was quite painful. Once Flickr receives your photo, they assign it a 10-digit ID. Once you find the ID by visiting your photo stream, you have to find a marker and write the ID down on your arm. But the fun doesn’t stop there, you also have to type a really long photo URL into Twitter to post the thing.
So with this pain in my heart and no more room on my arm to transcribe Flickr IDs, I spent some spare time writing SnapTweet.
I realize there is a lot more that it could do and that there are other services which do photos for Twitter. Two that come to mind are Twitxr and TwitPic. While these are cool services and all, I do disagree with a couple things about them.
Twitxr encourages the creation of a parallel set of friends. Even though they are leveraging Twitter for posting, they are not taking advantage of the social graph which I have already built in Twitter. TwitPic allows for photo comments. So, this is yet another piece of data which will be floating around out there while Flickr already provides a facility for commenting on photos.
Secondly, they accept photos directly into them so if I keep all my photos on Flickr, now I am keeping them in two places or maybe I’ll have some stored on these services and some on Flickr.
As a geek who is relatively happy with Twitter and Flickr, I didn’t see any reason to not try to leverage the two services for what they have.
If you ever find yourself wanting to post a recent photo to Twitter from your Flickrstream, please give SnapTweet a try. By either trying it out or telling your Twitter friends about it, you help me spread the word…and for that I am extremely grateful. If you want to keep up with me or the goings on with SnapTweet, I am damon on Twitter.
I am grateful to Dan Benjamin at Rails Machine for providing a reliable and easy hosting environment to deploy into and Bruce Williams for the killer SnapTweet logo.
Technorati Tags: [Flickr],[Twitter], [TwitPic], [Twitxr], [SnapTweet]
