Twitter Adding Photo and Video Sharing

Twitter made a big announcement yesterday. They are adding photo and video sharing to Twitter so that you no longer have to use third party services for that.

Photo Sharing

When that service is live it will have big implications for the various services that have cropped up to facilitate photo sharing via Twitter. Services like Twitpic and yfrog have cropped up to allow folks to share photos on the go easily via Twitter. Since this part of Twitter’s announcement isn’t operational yet, we’ll have to wait and see what the implications are here.

Twitter is partnering with Photobucket, a large and long established photo sharing site, for their new service. It will be interesting to see how accounts work for the people who already have Photobucket accounts.

Photo & Video Search

The other part of their service is live – photo and video search. This has huge implications which I think will be great for churches and ministries.

Basically they are indexing all of the images and videos which are shared via links on Twitter. When you use the Twitter search function, if there are any linked photos or videos that Twitter sees associated with that search or hashtag they will offer a “Display media” button. When you click that button it will display some photos and videos that are associated with that search.

If you want, you can also click the link to “Always display media like this” and save a step.

Next you can choose to “view all” of the photos or videos. When you do it takes you to a page with just those media files displayed so that you can browse through them.

If you find one you like, you can click on it. When you do it will make the images larger for closer inspection. For videos, you can watch them right in the Twitter interface.

If you like what you see, you can retweet it (share it on Twitter) right from the interface.

All in all, I think Twitter’s done an excellent job with their interface. Everything that I saw works smoothly and makes sense.

What This Means

Twitter has just made it even easier for your ministry to reach new people through Twitter with your creative images and videos.

It now becomes more important than ever that you add some descriptive text to your tweets when you share media files via Twitter. Without text in the tweet to describe what you are linking to, Twitter will have no way to know what your photo or video is about.

By using good descriptions and appropriate hashtags you will make your media more visible to more people.

And reaching more people is what it is all about, isn’t it.

Here’s the video that Twitter created for this announcement.

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