Flickr-to-Twitter, day 3

Wednesday, August 8, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I added another user, Fred Wilson of A VC.  

He successfully posted a picture this morning. He asked that I add a feature that uses the title of the picture in the Twitter post. Of course, makes total sense. Done.  

Now this new feature, and TwitterGrams, suggest that perhaps Twitter should have the concept of attachments for status messages, esp if they're posted through the API.  

There would be two parameters: 

1. A content type, like image/jpeg or audio/mpeg. 

2. The bits of the attachment. 

For a small set of types, Twitter would know how to display a "thumb" -- in the case of an image, it would be a tiny rendering of it. Click on the thumb to see the full picture. For MP3s, there would be an inline player. 

People are kind of repulsed by the urls I'm dropping into the feeds, on one hand, on the other, I'm getting a hundred new subscribers a day, so people are attracted to it in (much) greater numbers. Rich media in Twitter posts makes a lot of sense. A much prettier UI is possible, but this is something they have to do.