As a frequent Twitter user, there's nothing more appealing to me than checking out the photos and videos that the people I'm following publish in their Twitter timelines. It makes the experience a little more rich.
That's precisely why I wanted to write this roundup. Why only write text in Twitter? Why not share multimedia content? If you're like me, you'll want to do just that. So take a look at some of these services and let's work together at making Twitter just a little more fun to use.
Be entertained
Ffwd Video-sharing site Ffwd allows people to share their favorite videos with Twitter followers.
When you get to Ffwd, you can view a host of videos on several topics. When you find something you like, Ffwd provides a "Share to Twitter" option. When you click that, your update box will be populated with a standard tweet and a link to the video. You can change it before you send it out. It's a nice service, but given the fact that there are many more videos on YouTube (which also lets you share content on Twitter), it might not be your first option.
Ffwd populates your update box with a link and message.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Flickr If you're a Flickr user, the Yahoo-owned site allows you to show off your images on Twitter with the help of a unique Flickr URL.
In order to syndicate your content to Flickr, you first need to authorize it on your account through the "blog this" pane. Once Twitter is authorized, you can share any of your Twitter images with Flickr. I tried out the service, and it worked relatively well. The site provides users with a unique shortened Flickr URL for an image. That said, Flickr hides the "tweet" button under the "blog this" option. It's a little annoying. I would have liked to have more convenient access to it. Either way, it might be worth trying out if you're a frequent Flickr user.
Flickr makes it somewhat difficult to add photos to Twitter.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Google has begun showing ads next to image search results. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET News)As it promised to do, Google has begun testing ads shown next to image search results.
Google Blogoscoped and TechCrunch carried screen shots from readers showing the new tests, and Search Engine Land added a shot of a banner ad as well. Now I'm seeing the image ads too.
Google's cash cow is its ability to display small text ads next to search results, but the new examples include pictures as well. That could be more distracting or more useful, depending on how you see it, but Google insists that it'll place the ads only in a way that adds to the user experience, one measurement of which is that people search more often.
Yahoo Smush It finds Web site images that can be put on a diet.
(Credit: CNET News)Yahoo, which has considerable expertise in maximizing Web site performance, has long offered advice on how to speed up sites up by minimizing photo size. Now it's released a tool to help Web programmers automate the process.
The Web-based tool, called Smush It, can perform multiple operations to shrink graphics file sizes without impairing visual appeal, Chris Heilmann of the Yahoo Developer Network said in a blog post after tool creators Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov announced the tool at this week's Ajax Experience conference.
Among the things Smush It can do: convert GIF images to the PNG format; reduce the range of colors used in PNG files; strip out textual metadata from JPEG images.
Web developers can upload images to the site, send it a Web site address, or install a Firefox extension that submits a particular Web site with the click of a button. The tool presents users with a downloadable package of the smaller images that can be substituted.
Perhaps Yahoo should try its own medicine. I ran the tool on the Smush It announcement page and found that Yahoo could be trimmed away 23.6 percent of its graphics heft, saving 20KB of data. The Yahoo Developer Network page could be pared down 9.2 percent, saving 19.5KB.
Google wants to help you put a name to that face.
With a face recognition feature set to launch at noon PDT Tuesday, Google's Picasa Web Albums will help users label their photos with the names of subjects. That and other changes to the photo-sharing site are joined by a new beta version of the accompanying Picasa 3.0 photo-editing software.
The "name tag" feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly.
The Picasa Web Albums name tag feature groups like faces together to let users tag them with names a batch at a time (click to enlarge).
(Credit: Google)"Once you've started naming people, we'll start suggesting names for you based on similarity," said Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager. "The process of naming people is really addictive and tremendously fun."
Having tried the new service on dozens of photos, I wouldn't go that far. But it is a major advance in what I believe is a very important area, photo metadata.
Tagging is a powerful way to sort digital photographs. Photo albums are useful, but with rich tagging, people also can slice and dice their photo collection to show particular people, activities, or locations. Even with face recognition technology or other computer processing, the textual tags in photos are a far more reliable way for computers to understand image content.
And tags become even more powerful as photos are assembled into publicly accessible collections such as those at Yahoo's Flickr, Picasa, or Fox Interactive's Photobucket.
Eat your vegetables, exercise regularly, tag your photos
The problem with tagging is that it's a chore, so most people don't bother. But Picasa's name tag feature automates the process enough--and provides enough reason to use it--that I believe many users will take the tagging plunge.
It took me less than 15 minutes to tag close to 200 faces in a set of more than 100 photos, and that included some start-up time such as figuring out how the system worked, establishing names for various common subjects, and correcting a few errors. The most impressive moments are when Picasa presents a large array of photos with the same face, and you can label them all with a single click.
Picasa editing software now lets users export movies with musical soundtrack to a file or YouTube (click to enlarge).
(Credit: Google)I speak here from experience. I do tag my own photos--for example the 700 I took on a weeklong backpacking trip earlier this month--and something like Google's facial recognition assisting would have dramatically sped the process. It wouldn't help with other tags such as "swimming," "waterfall," or "Sierra tiger lily," but let's face it--people are the central feature in most people's photos.
Overall, Google's Picasa moves show that despite a long period of near-dormancy, Google still evidently is committed to the photography site and software.
However, Picasa overall still feels like a staid place to store photos, share them with friends, and maybe order prints. It doesn't match the vibrant community of Yahoo's Flickr. And though Flickr also has been slow to change, Yahoo has at least been nudging it in the right direction with additions such as online editing.
Picasa Web Albums' most conspicuously erroneous identification of a face, actually the spokes on my bicycle's front wheel.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)
Face recognition blemishes
Picasa's name tags are helpful but imperfect. The feature failed to find faces in several photos where I thought the faces were reasonably obvious. It also thought my bicycle wheel's spokes and wife's ear were faces. One excusable error: it thought a mask in a mural was a face, though for some reason it didn't bother with a couple of real humans in the same mural.
"Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera," Horowitz said. "There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows."
The most annoying error was that during the initial period when I was adding names to the system, it somehow came up with three separate versions of me and two versions of my son, despite the fact that I entered the same name and e-mail address. I fixed it by telling Picasa my alter egos were erroneously labeled, at which point they re-entered the labeling pool and I assigned them to the remaining identity. Too bad I didn't notice the "merge" option until later.
Picasa Web Albums asked me to identify this face it found--actually a mask in a mural (click to enlarge).
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Knowing the privacy implications of face recognition, Google is proceeding somewhat cautiously. Picasa users must specifically enable the name tag feature, and default name tags aren't shared publicly. Picasa users may only tag photos in their own account.
With the "name tag" feature, which users must specifically enable, Picasa presents groups of images sharing the same face. Users can label them with a person's name. Eventually users can click a tag to find shots of a particular subject in their photo collections,
The face recognition technology came to Google via its 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, Horowitz said.
There are other changes coming to Picasa Web Albums (though a change to Google Photos isn't one of them, at least right now). One is an "explore" view that lets people browse the total collection of public Picasa photos. It lets people browse by popular tags, location, and peer at recent uploads. Another is the ability to e-mail photos to the service.
Picasa 3 beta
Google also plans to release a beta version of the Picasa 3 image-editing. It works on Windows, though a Google Labs version has been transmogrified to work on Linux via the Wine software layer. Horowitz wouldn't confirm whether a Mac OS X version is anything more than an idea: "Macs are important to us," he said. "We're always looking for new ways making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."
The new Picasa software brings several changes:
• A movie maker mode lets people combine photos with music to export movie versions of galleries to watch on a PC or upload to YouTube.
• A new retouch brush lets people edit out skin blemishes and other trouble spots. And the tool can automatically fix red-eye problems caused by flash photography.
A collage mode in Picasa lets users create poster-size collections, sizing and placing each snapshot. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Google)• A new collage mode lets users compile many photos into one composite image. This time, users get precise control over image placement for example by moving, rotating, and resizing photos, and the software can produce a high-resolution composite for poster-size prints.
• A photo viewer for quick slideshows, an option that during installation politely asks to own the file associations for JPEG, TIFF, raw images from higher-end cameras, and some other formats. The slideshow software can view PNG files, which is handy, but the editing software still can't, which is a significant limitation for me.
• Online synchronization. If photos have been uploaded from Picasa to the Web site, they can be edited later and the changes, including tags, are synchronized to the Web site. This is very handy since you might want to get images up quickly to share with friends then edit them later. Unfortunately, changes on the Web site aren't mirrored back to the PC, so all those name tags will stay put in the cloud for now.
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