ImageShack, the oft-forgotten and underestimated venture capital backed media hosting company, has quietly launched an alternative to the image sharing tools for Twitter already out there, like TwitPic and Twitxr. The tool is called Yfrog and like its counterparts it allows for immediate posting to your Twitter stream any image you upload or link to.
Evidently, the image is hosted by ImageShack, so this is just another way for the company to get more people to learn about their media hosting wares. Once the image is up (example showing a guy eating a yfrog), you get the usual stuff like embed codes, custom thumbnails, a direct link to reblog and retweet the material, etc. We should note – and I’m getting tired of having to say this every time – that you have to enter your Twitter credentials to use Yfrog so that’s up to you.
Like TwitPic, YFrog has its own API, but the former is also built into most popular Twitter clients, so they have the advantage of already being familiar to most Twitter users who are interested in this type of service. TwitPic, which by the way is growing in traffic quite quickly, also enables you to comment on pictures on-site, has better navigation, tags and lets you view images in full size. Yfrog has some catching up to do in terms of features and integrating into the widely used Twitter clients.
Personally, I switched to Posterous some time ago, which lets you e-mail photos from your desktop or web client as well as your mobile phone and pushes the link for short blog posts, pictures and videos to a variety of social services (including Twitter). Also, it doesn’t show ads next to your uploaded pictures.
While this service is not as streamlined as twitpic; it is good to have competition and alternative channels for easily sharing images easily to your twitter followers.
This probably is a smart business play on the part of imageshack. Too bad they did not address some of the shortcomings of twitpic.
Cheers!
what shortcomings are you talking about?
Twitpic is awesome IMO
Imageshack is an untrustworthy service that has been known to violate their own privacy policy in the past. Why? For fun, according to their founder.
http://mikeabun...privacy-policy/
http://digg.com...hy_Just_for_fun
Tweetube is the best twitpic alternative. You can share multiple pictures with one link. http://tweetube.com.
I like posting with Posterous too but you lose geo tags.
Rotzy is another good one… though only for iPhone at the moment. Geotags, commenting via another photo, auto-post to Twitter, Tumblr, FB at the same time, etc. Its great! Ok, I’m biased hehe.
BTW, how is TwitPic paying for all the storage they must be using up? Seems like its growing super fast!
Glad to see Twitpic growing I really like the application. Other apps have a lot of catching up to do.
Robin
2 other things. they need to kill the annoying pop up ads on yfrog (tho i am sure it generates revenue).
They should use oauth so people do not have to enter their passwords. After playing with it a bit I am wondering why they did not build out a bit more functionality before the launch. Seriously; another 80 hours of coding and they could have something that feels much more competitive.
I don’t think Twitter fully supports OAuth yet (although they are running tests). As for the pop-up ads, there are ways never to see those again
Also, posterous has a badass bookmarklet. So you can tweet cool videos and images from whatever website you’re on in seconds. We’ll post it to all the other services you use instantly.
http://posterou...elp/bookmarklet
The bookmarklet needs a little work, I find myself always having to edit posts on Posterous after I use it, particularly with images.
Hey Robin — I’ll follow up with you over twitter — will definitely get these fixed. =)
nice example pic – yummy
nothing wrong with trying different channels to bring traffic
Tell me… why is this a underestimated company again…?
http://www.tech...nder-ambitions/
I really like Posterous. You can upload video files too (avi and mpg), as well as docs, ppts, and pdfs.
TwitPic is good for sharing one pic, but if you want to share a collection of pics you could give http://www.troovi.com a try. Troovi is a dead simple group photo sharing website and next to other services (delicious, facebook, etc.) it also integrates Twitter for sharing your pics and collections. There’s no registration required.
(Disclaimer: I created that site)
Why don’t more people GeoTag their uploaded pictures through a service like BrightKite? BrightKite has an iPhone app and supports uploading through TXT and email and has social networking features to sync it with Twitter and Facebook.
Without GeoTagging, to me all the services are just FTP sites.
not working with opera
This site looks/ feels like a bad joke to me…
pop ups? from a competing web app? in 2009? really?
For me – this alone will be the reason I’ll never use anything imageshack again.
I’m just not feeling it…
I just seems like a forced imitation.
Cant help but notice a very anti-twitter vibe is going on here…
What the…
Did anyone else catch that imageshack/ yFrog copied the TWITPIC API verbatum?
lol look at this crap:
http://yfrog.co...d_and_post.html
vs.
http://www.twit...o#uploadAndPost
classy…
Definitely a copy, but I wonder if it is more of a strategy, rather than laziness to copy it verbatim, save for the posting URL. It makes it nice and easy for those using the TwitPic API to switch over to the YFrog API. Now all those folks have to do is change one line – replace with “twitpic.com” with “yfrog.com” in your code and you’ve moved over.
Yet, neither TwitPic nor YFrog offer any way to search through the API. Or on the site at all.
YFrog feels clunky when it comes to retweeting pics. TwitPic’s is a bit easier but neither one is exactly easy to use.
Cool…would be nice with Twitzu http://www.twitzu.com
Yet one more way we can create blogging out of micro-blogging.
Point???
Thanks for the great feedback about yfrog. We will be posting all updates about yfrog to twitter. Please follow us @yfrog, http://twitter.com/yfrog
http://tweetube.com is the BEST twitpic alternative. Period.