Published March 02, 2009.
In Tips & tricks
By steffentchr.
Tagged .
Commented 5 times.
This weekend we released some new features on 23, the biggest of which (literally) concerned the design of the photo pages. The other notabvle improvement in the go-around, however, was Twitter and microblog integration. You’ll find the control panel for these features under Options -> Status Updates. Using this panel you can connect to Twitter or to Ping.fm.
Now, here’s a short intro to microblogging with 23…
Posting automatic status updates
Over the past few months we’ve had short status updates listed in the header of user accounts. These messages are automatically generated from photos uploaded publicly, i.e. “Steffen has uploaded 7 photos to the album New York”. To have these messages posted to Twitter or any other connected microblog, simply set Auto-post 23 status to microblog to Yes when you connect the blog.
Now, whenever you upload a public batch of photos to 23, we’ll update your network with a suitable message and a short link back to the album, the tag or whatever.
Microblogging a photo with your own message
When you’ve set up Twitter or Ping.fm you’ll find a link to Microblog this photo in the sidebar next to every public photo. Click the link, write your message, and click the Update button. That’s all.
Posting photos to Twitter from your mobile phone
We’ve been allowing users to upload photos via email and then auto-blogging those incoming photos for a while now. This feature has been expanded to include microblogs as well: Simply send a photo and it’s caption to your secret email address and we’ll manage the distribution for you.
To set up this feature, first connect your 23 account to a microblog. Then browse to Settings for mail upload and add a new address. To complete the set-up click the Edit link, select Public and check the box next to Twitter and/or Ping.fm. After you’ve clicked the Save button you’ve got yourself a simple email-to-23-to-microblog chain.
But Twitter is *so* 2008 and I like (insert name here) better…
We thought you’d say that — which is why we’ve added support for Ping.fm. Ping.fm let’s you distribute your status updates to more than 30 social networks such as Facebook, Jaiku, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and Identi.ca. This means that you’ll never be limited to Twitter or any other altmodisch, over-crowded service.
When you’ve signed up for Ping.fm, simply connect 23 to Ping and then Ping to your favorite site — and you’re good to go.
That’s about it for now. We’ve been quite busy today building a tool which would fit perfectly on to this list, but we’ll keep that to ourselves for now. Until then, don’t forget to follow 23 on Twitter.
Comments:
1
Yes, I’m one of those guys that point out typos:
s/to Twitter from you mobile/to Twitter from your mobile/
But, seriously. This is neat.
2
How often does 23 send updates on to e.g. Ping.fm?
I use Pixelpipe on the iPhone to post pictures to 23. How fast is the uploaded picture sent on to the rest of my ping-connected network(in this instance; facebook) ?
Also do you know how to mBlog centrally? Can uploading to ping.fm via. pixelpipe make sure that a picture is distributed to 23, flickr, facebook and other connections? I know you’re probably going to say “why not just upload to 23 and let ping.fm distribute the upload notification”… Well it could be cool to upload a picture(with geotags intact) that gets redistributed rather than just a text notification :)
Maybe I’m asking the wrong place too but you(I suppose you made this post Steffen?) seem to know alot about the possibilities with ping.fm and the services it can connect to?!
3
Yup, Steffen here…
I don’t know much about ping.fm — and frankly I’m unsure about the whole network of distributions possibilities. I’d probably try to have Pixelpipe (or possibly tarpipe?) do most of the distributing for me rather than thinking too much about ping.fm.
Updates are generated and sent within about 20 minutes of a batch of photos being uploaded; depending on whether photos are private, have tags, etc…
4
Thanks for the input :)
5
one suggestion for the “status updates”:
when uploading “only” one photo, it would be nice to inlcude a direct link to the photo and not the album/tag/….
And if the photo also has a “name”, this name could be mentioned in the update.