twitsnaps

Archive for July, 2009

TwitSnaps noticed that the followers count of many users on Twitter is dropping rapidly. Don’t be alarmed. It is possible that Twitter may be removing some bots. It helps you to understand the number of actual followers that you have.

Maybe, Twitter is planning to turn this into a regular exercise. They could be removing bots on a periodic basis. It’s good for you, good for Twitter. But it surely saddens everyone to see their number of followers going down. Have you lost any followers? How many of them? Do leave a comment here and let us know.

Users can now tag their photographs on TwitSnaps. Unlike other photoshare applications, we have enabled automated tagging. What you have to do is this- Add relevant hashtags to the description part of your photographs. The hashtags get picked up automatically and used as a tag for categorization.

For example, if you upload a humorous photograph and use the hashtag #fun in the description, your photograph gets automatically added under the category- fun. All the photographs containing the hashtag “#fun” are displayed like this on TwitSnaps- http://twitsnaps.com/tag/fun.

To view any photograph related to a specific topic, type the following url into your browser- http://twitsnaps.com/tag/topic. For example, to view all food related photographs on TwitSnaps, you would have to replace “topic”  with “food” in the previous url, http://twitsnaps.com/tag/food.

There’s more to the system of tagging that we introduced on TwitSnaps. Whatever hashtags you add in the description, it automatically creates a new sub-category under your TwitSnaps profile. In case the sub-category already functional, the new photograph gets added to the records. So if @PhotoClog uploads photographs using hashtag- #SanJose, his San Jose photographs get automatically added to http://twitsnaps.com/PhotoClog/SanJose.

The TwitSnaps tagging system requires minimal effort on your part, as you can easily use hashtags in the tweet that gets posted on Twitter. It’s a nice feature that even Twitter can implement to help Tweeple re-visit older tweets quickly or see personal tweets pertaining to specific hashtags. Do tell us what you think about this neat feature.

The team has introduced a new feature- you can now set up your own TwitSnaps email address. To upload photographs on TwitSnaps, you can either use the default email address that we have provided, or create a brand new one. Log in to your TwitSnaps account, go to “Settings”, and you’ll be able to create a unique email address.

Why introduce this feature?

Have you heard about how Britney Spears’ Twitpic account got hacked? No? Please read this blog post. Yes, it was done in bad taste. When news about celebrity deaths were causing great amount of distress to fans, someone just chose to exploit a serious security vulnerability of Twitpic. In an act of hacking, termed as bruteforce hacking, someone must have ran a program to guess the default, Twitpic email address of Britney Spears. Twitpic, we believe, is yet to speak on the issue of how they are tackling this vulnerability to which all celebrity users of their service are exposed.

TwitSnaps introduces new security measure

The TwitSnaps team worked out a unique solution to meet this challenge. You can now set up an easy- to-remember email id for your TwitSnaps account and use it to send your photographs via email. You don’t have to stick to the default email address that is automatically created when you log in for the first time. Go ahead, create your own email address, and feel as secure as possible.

We sincerely hope that other photoshare applications such as Twitpic will introduce a similar security measure against bruteforce hacking. It’s all about caring for your users. What say? :-)

This blog post is dedicated to all users of TwitSnaps, who have been instrumental in helping us grow! The photographs and videos that you share, are highly valued and we enjoy looking at them. Your suggestions and feedback has been instrumental in sharpening the energy and vision of our team.

Listed below, in no particular order, are the names of some of the keen followers and users of TwitSnaps.

1)   Randy Burman

2)   Susan

3)   Agnes Aviiki

4)   Dee Mitrowski

5)   Gurgavin Pal Singh (Aged 6!)

6)   Sukhdeep Singh

7)   Shilpa Srivastava

8)   Focus Singapore

9)   India Travel News

10) Middle East Hub

We also have many celebrity users on TwitSnaps. Gul Panag, a popular Bollywood actress, does a lot of photo-blogging on Twitter. To view her entire collection of photographs on TwitSnaps, click here. She tweets from her heart and is a wonderful person to know. It’s not Friday today, but we’d still recommend a #FollowFriday for Gul Panag. You can follow the pretty Indian actress at http://twitter.com/gulpanag.

Another celebrity, Nikhil Chinapa,  a popular MTV VJ from India, has recently joined TwitSnaps. You can follow him on Twitter too- http://twitter.com/nikhilchinapa

We are always keen to improve and provide you with a better product. So go ahead,  suggest what you want TwitSnaps to do, and we’ll surely look into it. Post a comment on this blog and let us know what you think. You never know, next time we do a blog post dedicated to TwitSnaps users, you could get coverage from us

A lot has changed since our last blog post. It’s difficult to cover each and every aspect of what’s been happening on TwitSnaps.com. But we’ll try and make an attempt to summarize.

TwitSnaps got coverage from tech evangelist Robert Scobleizer, where he interviewed our founder Simarprit Singh. You can view the entire video interview and Robert’s blog post at Scobleizer.com.

We introduced many new features and utilities on TwitSnaps. Now you can upload and share all your favorite videos on Twitter using http://videos.twitsnaps.com. Or you can do it directly through our parent site TwitSnaps.com by selecting the “Upload Videos” option.

We officially introduced the video utility during a successful launch event on July 1st, ‘09 in San Jose. We got instant coverage from InventorSpot.com, where writer Ron Callari wrote extensively about our Twitter application.

TwitSnaps also got its first celebrity user in Gul Panag, a popular Bollywood actress. You can view her entire collection of photoblogs at TwitSnaps.com/gulpanag

We have always claimed, TwitSnaps.com is a site developed on the basis of your feedback and suggestions. Hence it’s only natural that we give credit to some of our loyal users who have really helped us build this application. We’ll be covering them in a subsequent blog post. Watch out for that!