Twitter Tuesday - photos and videos may land in your Twitter stream soon

Twitter Tuesday - photos and videos may land in your Twitter stream soon

Filed under: Features, Web services, Social Software, Microblogging

The big story in Twitterland this week is the rumors of photo and video support coming to the Twitter website. Up until now, you've been able to use third party services to share photos and videos, and a lot of clients -- including the official Twitter mobile apps -- have been able to display them with one click. Well, now there's something called "Tweet Media" that's showing up in some users' settings, and it looks like a test of inline media for the Twitter web.

Mashable spotted and reported on this option before it disappeared -- apparently, the test is over for the moment -- and got a quote from Twitter that confirms the possibility of inline photos and vids. "We're constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps," said a Twitter rep.

What would that mean to Twitpic, YFrog, and other Twitter photo services? Well, they'd definitely still be useful for hosting your photos, unless Twitter starts offering storage space (unlikely, especially with video). The best case scenario is that Twitter will do what many third-party Twitter clients do, and autodetect links that lead to a photo or video on these services.Hey, Android users! Twitter for Android just got a minor, but very useful update: autorefresh. No more jamming the refresh button every 3 minutes. Who am I kidding? I know you will anyway, but at least you don't have to anymore. The update also fixes a people search bug, so grab it if you've been having issues looking up other users.

Seesmic Web has also received some awesome new updates, including desktop notifications. Our own Lee Mathews is a Seesmic user, and he's got the skinny on what's new in the latest version.

Absolutely zero users in a new survey said they'd be willing to pay for Twitter. The Annenberg School of Communication at USC conducted the study that found that people would rather be exposed to ads on Twitter than pay money for the service. Would you ever pay for Twitter? Is there any added "pro" feature they could introduce that would be worth money to you?

If you want to know how the country is feeling, all it takes is a look at Twitter. An impressive new project called Pulse of the Nation (from Harvard University) displays a map of the US, with a color-coded evaluation of regional moods based on the language in tweets. The map is stretched and pinched based on tweet volume, so it doesn't look like the US maps you're used to seeing. Still, it's a very interesting proof-of-concept, and I would love to see a real-time version of it. Right now, you can check out a big PDF and a time-lapse video.

Hey, thanks for reading another Twitter Tuesday! Before I sign off, I'd like to throw a question out to all our Twitter-obsessed readers: which Twitter clients are you guys using regularly? I'd love to know, so I can focus the column on the apps you care about most.

See you next Tuesday!

Twitter Tuesday - photos and videos may land in your Twitter stream soon originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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