Twitter Introduces Photo – Sharing Via Text Messages, Not Yet Available In India

Social media has become a part of our lives where we are active on multiple social networks and often simultaneously. Twitter, tough no where near Facebook’s 700 million users, has over 200 million users. Increasingly, tweets have started containing links to photos and videos. Smartphone users had the option to access their Twitter accounts through apps, but the feature phone users were ignored till now. Twitter has now introduced a service which allows users to share photos through texts.

Sending a photo to Twitter is as simple as sending a MMS. Upload the desired photo into a text message and send it to Twitter  just like a normal text tweet.

Feature phone users, who constitute the majority of mobile phone users in the world, will love this development as they no longer have to connect to a laptop or PC just to share a photo on Twitter. The option to tweet DM’s (direct messages) through a text is still not available and Twitter should look into the matter. Unfortunately this service is not yet available in India, but noting the fact that Vodafone is already offering this service in UK and Italy it is only a matter of time before they offer it here is India as well. Plus Vodafone seems to be interested in social networks.

Photo-sharing has become one of the primary activities on social networks. Facebook processes over 6 billion photos every month and that is one of its key to success. Twitter understood this and decided to bring photo-sharing in-house. Twitpic.com had been the preferred photo-sharing aid for Twitter till now, but now they have launched their own photo-sharing service in partnership with Denver, Colorado-based Photobucket. Photobucket is one of the leading photo and video sharing service in the world. Everyday over 4 million images and videos are shared on Photobucket.

Before the MMS tweet feature had been introduced, the simple SMS tweet feature was available in 80 countries and in 9 languages. The Twitter blog informs that around 4 billion SMS tweets are processed by Twitter on a monthly basis. Now figure will definitely go up. If you tweet through text messages regularly then Twitter provides a few other interesting and useful options.

First up are the SMS Commands options. You can send simple one-word commands to Twitter to access useful information. Text “Suggest” to Twitter and you will get a list of suggestions on possible accounts you can follow. If you want to check on your profile information, like number of followers you have or the number of accounts you follow, then you can text “Stats” to Twitter.

In order to get some tips to optimize your Twitter experience you can text “Help” or “Tips” to Twitter. If you do not have a Twitter account and yet wish to follow what’s happening on the micro-blogging site then you can utilize the “Fast Follow” option.

Article Source