I’ve always been a fan of Twitter, even before Twitter became popular. It seems as though I’ve been on Twitter forever, just call me an early adopter. It looks like we are finally getting a much-needed upgrade to the Twitter web interface, which is really just a new small option. You can now add images to your Tweets, right from the web interface.
Take a look at the screen capture above. You can now click on the little camera icon on the left side of the Tweet box and upload an image. Then, when you tweet, your tweet will include an image link to the photo or screen capture that you have uploaded. It’s hosted on pic.twitter.com for you.
When your tweet is posted, here is what it looks like:
As you can see, I went ahead and used that image as an example, and actually tweeted about it on Twitter to see exactly what it looks like.
When you use an image in your tweet, I do have a few recommendations:
– Make sure that the image isn’t too small, as people do like to see larger photos rather than thumbnails. I personally like to resize my photos or screen captures anywhere between 300 width and about 1000 width max.
– I have not checked on the file size yet, but I would imagine that your photo from your 14 megapixel camera is probably going to be too large to tweet. You might want to resize it first. Besides, it may just take too long to upload it.
– When you add a tweet, keep in mind that a link to the photo URL is going to be added automatically to your Tweet. So, you may want to keep the text in your Tweet a bit shorter than usual.
As I mentioned above, it appears that the photo is being hosted on http://pic.twitter.com. However, if you mouseover the URL and watch the actual link and where you’re taken, it goes to http://t.co and then to your actual Tweet, with the larger image. It just doesn’t make sense that Twitter would add a URL that’s then a redirect that then redirects back to twitter.com. That’s too many redirects!
Take a look at what happens when you go to your pic.twitter.com image URL:
Parameters:
URL = http://pic.twitter.com/JSDYArO
UAG = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
AEN =
REQ = GET ; VER = 1.1 ; FMT = AUTO
Sending request:GET /JSDYArO HTTP/1.1
Host: pic.twitter.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Connection: close• Finding host IP address…
• Host IP address = 199.59.148.12
• Finding TCP protocol…
• Binding to local socket…
• Connecting to host…
• Sending request…
• Waiting for response…
Receiving Header:
HTTP/1.1·301·Moved·Permanently
Date:·Tue,·09·Aug·2011·20:40:58·GMT
Server:·hi
Location:·http://twitter.com/bhartzer/status/101026516720304128/photo/1
Cache-Control:·private,max-age=300
Expires:·Tue,·09·Aug·2011·20:45:58·GMT
Content-Length:·0
Connection:·close
Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=UTF-8
At least they’re using a 301 Permanent Redirect to do the redirect over to your Twitter status URL.
On a sidenote, it does not look like any images or photos are being indexed on http://pic.twitter.com (yet) in Google’s search engine.