I was late to the photo sharing phenomenon on Twitter; my first smartphone, an Apple iPhone 3G (not 3GS), took pretty horrible pictures, and as I had a two year contract with AT&T for that phone, I was unable to share photos from my phone for those two years. Now that I’ve moved overseas I’ve bought an iPhone 4 and have been very impressed with the quality of the photos it takes! It was about time to get involved and to start sharing pictures with my friends on Twitter.

So here’s how to use Twitpic, and when I think it is a good idea to do so.

How to use Twitpic

Using Twitpic is easy…

1. First, login to Twitter. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, you’ll want to sign up for one.
2. Once you have a Twitter account and are online, go to Twitpic’s homepage.
3. Click the Sign in with Twitter button at the top of the page; it will bring you to Twitpic’s welcome page.
4. Select Let’s Get Started (be sure to uncheck the box to choose not to follow Noah Everett and Twitpic if you don’t care to see news and information from the founder of Twitpic or from Twitpic itself).
5. On the next screen you will be able to upload photos and send the links to Twitter; on the right hand side of the screen you will also be given an email address to send photos to Twitpic in the form of yourtwittername.####@twitpic.com, putting whatever description you’d like to send to Twitter with your photo in the subject line. This is the method that I personally use to send photos to Twitpic – I take a picture on my iPhone, click to view it, and then click to email it to Twitpic.

When to use Twitpic

While researching Twitpic I ran across a post on The Next Web from a fellow who was of the opinion that you should never use Twitpic or similar media-sharing services. His argument is that it is much better to post your media to your WordPress blogs using Posterous (Posterous can also send media to Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Xanga – it’s certainly worth checking out). That way you can have complete control over your media; it will be searchable, it will not disappear if Twitpic should get purchased or go out of business, and you can control your own branding on the site where the page appears. I have to agree that these are all very good points, especially the last one – I personally stopped using LiveJournal as my primary blog when an ad on a post I submitted featured a huge photo of dirty yellow teeth – it really distracted from the heartfelt post I was sharing on the site!

However, I disagree that you should never share photos or videos to sites like Twitpic… I do think such sites have a time and place. The best time to share photos on Twitpic is when you don’t really care if your photos disappear in a few years, in a few months, or even in a few days… this is when the photos you are sharing are timely, and relevant because you’re sharing them in real time. Some examples of this include photos of the people you’re hanging with, or of a dish of the food you’re about to eat, or of something you find interesting at the time. On my own Twitter feed I shared a picture of the Châtelet Metro station in Paris, because I had noticed that since my last visit to Paris they’d installed safety gates beside the rails. This was interesting to me because I was there looking at it and wanted to share it, but certainly wouldn’t care to save it for posterity on my blog! Same thing goes for my stream of consciousness pictures during a visit to IKEA.

That being said, there is another option to consider – posting a photo to Twitpic when something happens, and then posting it to your blog later when you have a chance to download it onto a computer, resize it properly, crop it, and otherwise ensure that it is of proper quality for your personal blog and your own personal brand. In this manner you can summarize your activities to Twitter when they happen, and then craft proper blog entries about them later, where you can go into more detail about them. As I mentioned, the beauty of media on Twitpic is its real-time nature. I personally prefer to craft quality blog posts and not simply throw stuff onto my site (as such, I really dislike applications that automatically post daily recaps of your tweets to your blog – I like reading microblogs in real time, but I don’t much care to see archives of them).

It’s fun to view photos on Twitpic, catching real-time glimpses of the lives of the people that I follow on Twitter. If you’re not already posting your own photos to Twitpic or a similar media sharing site, I suggest you give it a shot!

Following people, and being followed

In my opinion, the concept of followers as it is being used on Twitter today doesn’t work very well. There is a huge subset of people online today whose goal it is to amass as many followers as they can get, regardless of whether or not they share their interests, or in fact are even interested in reading what those users have to say at all. This turns Twitter into a popularity contest of sorts where the goal isn’t to interact or communicate, but to “win the game”. That being said, I myself will follow people who have followed me, and read their tweets, even if I don’t share their interests, and I’ll interact with them as appropriate; if they’re reaching out to me for whatever reason, I’ll reciprocate. If I follow someone and they don’t follow me back, or unfollow me for whatever reason, I’m eventually going to unfollow them. I’m firm in my belief that Twitter should be a two way street; if I want to read information about a particular individual without the two-way communication there are better ways to do that.

I have somewhat around 450 followers on Twitter, which isn’t a heck of a lot and not even in the same ballpark as what some people have – tens of thousands of followers. But I do notice that even 450 people is way too many to keep up with. Whenever I check my Twitter page, or Tweetdeck on my phone, I’ll catch a glimpse at what’s going on at that very moment, but when I’m not checking Twitter the rest of the stuff that’s going on out there is lost to me.

This is okay for me, as I’m an individual, and it doesn’t matter too much to me why people are following me, or if I miss something that someone says about me, or don’t reply to someone who has messaged me within a given period of time. But these misses can become problems for businesses whose reputation is built on the way that they communicate with their customers. When a business first signs on to Twitter it is making a commitment to forge relationships with its clients, and there is a very real possibility that by doing it wrong they could make things worse.

Using Twitter as a business tool

If you’re a business, you want to promote your Twitter account as a means of opening up your business to Twitter users. When someone follows your business on Twitter, it’s key to follow them back – consumers are used to their showing an interest in products and services being a one-way street; if you follow them back, it may surprise and even delight them, and show them that you care about their interest in your company. If you send them a message, or interact with the things they say even when they don’t address you directly, you will be sending a very strong and powerful message. It’s one thing to be a tea company that automatically friends anybody who mentions “tea” in their tweets (this happened to me), but to actually comment on the tea mentioned in the tweet, or to suggest a cake to go with that tea, is truly going the extra mile. It will shock your customers, and in a good way.

The problem here is that it’s very hard for your business with its single Twitter account to scale properly when it comes to interacting with the potentially large masses of people who may be interested in your product. If you have 30 or 40 followers that’s one thing; it’s pretty easy to interact with them. But if you have tens of thousands of people following you, it’s hard to go that extra mile; most businesses simply don’t have the time or resources to respond to tens of thousands of people in a personal manner.

One way to solve this problem is to tweet as an individual working at an organization, rather than as “the organization”. That way, if you aren’t able to keep in touch with your followers 24 hours a day, you will be given some leeway – after all, people do have to sleep, eat, and take time away from their computers. The downside to this is that if the person tweeting from your organization leaves the company, his or her raft of followers will be leaving too… it will be the character recognizable to people on Twitter rather than the company itself. Plus, your business reputation will be tied to the actions of the individual or individuals who tweet on behalf of your company, and what they say on Twitter. In contrast, corporate Twitter accounts can be puppeted by many behind the scenes, and rules can be set regarding what or what not to broadcast.

Using search and hashtags in Twitter

The most obvious method to wade through the sea of tweets you face every time you log on is to use Twitter’s search feature. You can search on anything, and you can use the AND and OR tags to help you. Searching for “international AND business” will bring up tweets with both keywords in the tweet; “international OR business” will bring up tweets with one or the other, or both. The default is AND; if you type “international business” you’ll get tweets with international and business in the tweet.

The problem with this is that what you’re looking to communicate about may be vague enough that searching on that term will not provide valuable results. Soft drink makers searching for “drink” may find tweets about people drinking coffee or tea or going on late-night benders. Searching for “soda” will result in people talking about soda, but what if the tweet uses the term “soft drink” or “pop”? It will take some careful crafting of search phrases in order to achieve valuable results.

Hashtags (placing a # before a word in your tweet) make some sense of the spam, but only for those people who know to use hashtags when they’re making a post about something. If you’re looking for real-time information and you use a hashtag to find information, you’re only finding real-time information created by people who use hashtags. If someone’s complaining about your company on Twitter you’re going to want to know about it and respond to it whether or not the user has included a hashtag before your company name.

Some possible improvements for the future

As Twitter grows and evolves, there are several ways that I can imagine the service being improved.

• A filter bar along the top of the page to filter out probably spam, links, retweets, etc, to get at different reported views of the information you want to see.
• A list of people you are interested in (an easier to read version of the list you see when you click the link to see who you are following) so that you can easily see what they’re up to.
• A way to mod up and down comments, and to see only comments that are modded up (a certain star rating, etc). One similar method currently being implemented by Twitter is giving retweeted comments a higher “rating” than non-retweeted comments; those comments that are retweeted more are more likely to show up in a search.
• A focus away from people (a stream of what a person is saying) to a topic. This is akin to searching by hashtag, but topics may have several keywords that can lead into a “topic page”. So a page about open source development might feature the keywords Linux, GNU, Unix, etc.
• Company-specific Twitter pages, where companies can included a variety of different search terms and associated Twitter users to create a customized real-time Twitter portal for the company.

You can sign up to get your own Gravatar at the Gravatar web site.  The process is pretty simple:

1. Enter your email address
2. Reply to the confirmation email that gets sent to that email address
3. Choose a username (doesn’t really matter what it is) and a password
4. Click to add a new image
5. Select an image and crop it accordingly
6. Select a rating for your image (more on that below)
7. You’re done!

Once you’ve completed these steps, whenever you make a comment on a WordPress blog and enter your email address with the comment, the Gravatar associated with that email address will show up. Even though your email address will not be visible to people viewing your comment, your Gravatar will be visible. The Gravatar service within WordPress will look up your email address in the Gravatar’s bank of users and find the portrait associated with your email address. It will then display that picture beside your comment on the WordPress blog in the size dictated by the web site’s comment code. So your Gravatar will display in different sizes depending on the preferences of the person who set up the blog.

Gravatars can be rated G (General), PG (Parental Guidance), R (Restricted) or X (X-Rated). So, for example, you can choose to have two Gravatars; one of your face, and one of your privates (I don’t know why you would make a Gravatar of your privates… but you could). You could then set up the picture of your mug as your G-rated Gravatar, and the one of your privates as your X-rated Gravatar… for sites with a maximum Gravatar rating of G, PG and R your face would show up, and your naughty bits for sites that allowed X-rated Gravatars.

To set up your site to allow a certain rating of Gravatars on your WordPress blog, go to Settings on your WordPress dashboard, and click on Discussion. At the bottom of the page is a section for Avatars. Within this section you can choose to display or not to display avatars, the maximum rating of avatars that you will allow, and what the default avatar for visitors who have not yet set up an avatar should be.

Gravatars can also be displayed on your individual WordPress posts anywhere you like, by inserting the following PHP code in to your single.php file (or whatever file you use to display individual posts):

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), $size = '80'); ?>

If you look at the top right hand corner of this page, you’ll see this code in action – that image is being pulled from the Gravatar bank of portraits (if you right click on it and view it’s properties, you’ll see it’s coming from gravatar.com). When I registered as a user on this web site I entered my email address; the Gravatar is pulled from gravatar.com by using that author-specified email address. Note that you can change the size of the Gravatar by adjusting the $size variable. A word on this subject: Gravatars aren’t of excellent quality (I find they degrade significantly once you upload them to gravatar.com) so if you have a personal blog and are the sole poster, you might prefer to link to a better quality image within your site’s own infrastructure.

A couple of final notes: Gravatars go a long way toward building your personal brand online, so be careful what image you choose to use as your Gravatar! If you set up a new Gravatar and the email address you use is associated with comments that you have made in the past, your new Gravatar will show up on those comments. Also, if you change your Gravatar, wherever you have previously left a comment using the email address associated with the changed Gravatar, the new Gravatar will show up. If you do choose to upload an image of your privates (hint: don’t do it!) that image could suddenly pop up in hundreds of different places, without your being aware of it.

If you don’t have a Gravatar yet, why don’t you go ahead and get one now – they’re easy to choose and maintain, and they certainly add some personality to your online commentary.

A while back I wrote a post about the new Collecta widget for web and for WordPress, allowing you to embed Collecta real-time search onto your web pages and WordPress blogs. Since I wrote the post (on the day of the service’s release) Collecta has really taken off, and is getting a lot of great press.

Although I’m a big fan of Collecta (the service having been developed by, among others, my friends and former co-workers Christopher, Nathan and Matthew) I didn’t find the Collecta widget for WordPress very useful for my site. The reason for this is that the Collecta widget’s search parameters are defined on a per-site basis; you define them on the Widgets dashboard, and then wherever you place the widget on your site, those same search parameters are used. I wanted to be able to define my search parameters depending on the subjects of my individual posts – a reasonable demand for any blogger whose posts may span a variety of different topics.

The way I solved this was by using the Custom Fields functionality within WordPress. If I added a value for Collecta in a Collecta custom field when composing my post, a Collecta widget would appear in my sidebar using the search terms I’d defined. If I didn’t define a custom field for Collecta, that area of the sidebar would remain blank. It’s a bit of a hack, and Christopher and I plan to try to make something more permanent to address this need in the future, but at this point (as far as I’ve been able to find) I think I’m the only one who is using Collecta on a per-post basis within WordPress in this manner, so it’ll do for now.

And here’s how I did it, in case you’re interested in doing the same – fair warning, it does involve editing some code!

What you’re going to do is access the Collecta widget at collecta.com by using some PHP that you put into the sidebar on the web page that renders your posts. On your single.php page (or whatever page it is that displays your posts) enter this code where you want your widget to appear on the page:

<?php include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/collecta.php' ); ?>

This accesses a file called collecta.php in your WordPress template directory where your widget code will be stored. Go ahead and create collecta.php, and within it, write these lines:

<?php if (get_post_meta($post->ID, collecta, true)) { ?>

<h3><?php _e(get_post_meta($post->ID, collecta, true)); ?></h3>

<iframe style="border:none;width:100%; height:480px;" src="http://widget.collecta.com/widget.html?&query=<?php _e(urlencode(get_post_meta($post->ID, collecta, true))); ?>&alias=&nologo=false" id="widgetframe" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

<?php } else { ?>

<?php } ?>

This code places a Collecta widget on your post's page if you have defined a variable for the Collecta custom field, or displays nothing if you haven't. Note that you can turn on and off displaying the Collecta logo by using the "nologo" parameter, and you can also adjust the height and width of the widget by adjusting those parameters.

Save the file, then go ahead and start a new post. On your Edit Post screen, somewhat down the page, there is a box called Custom Fields, within which you can find an option to Add new custom field. Select Enter new, add a value of "collecta", and then click on Add Custom Field.

Click on - Select -, and choose the "collecta" value that you've just entered. Under Value enter the search terms that you'd like to have your post's Collecta widget perform real-time search for.

Write your post, save it, and view it - the Collecta widget should show up on your individual post using the search terms you've indicated, just as it does on the post you're reading right now, where I've defined the search term as "Collecta". Note that you can also search for multiple terms by using OR; for example, "Collecta OR widget".

I hope this helps you get the very powerful Collecta real-time search widget onto your posts - please let me know if you have any questions or feedback, and I'd be glad to help you however I can.

Good luck!

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