I don’t know about you, but when I see a link to a picture shared on Twitter, I almost always click on it. Sharing images in real-time is a particularly interesting use of the service. And now there’s a more interesting way to view these time-sensitive pictures with Twicsy.
The service, launched by the social search engine Searchles, features a main page that is filled with image thumbnails. All of them are images shared over Twitter on either TwitPic or yFrog (two of the most popular Twitter picture sites, currently). The default is to show images from the past hour, but you can set different time intervals to change what images are shown. Hovering over any of them shows a larger version of the image, along with some details about it, like its link and tags.
If you click on any of these thumbnails, you’re taken to a page that shows the image, shows who has tweeted about it, and images that Twicsy believes are related. These related images are shown based on contextual tags and user analysis, we’re told.
Interestingly, Twicsy doesn’t use Twitter’s search API to find these images. Instead, it indexes all tweets with image links and populates them from that.
But perhaps the most useful feature of Twicsy is its own search functionality. For anything you query, Twicsy pulls up related images that have been shared on Twitter. You can sort these by time or by relevance. The results are pretty solid.
As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place.
Is there any way to opt out? I don’t want my pictures on a random website.
but you share them with the public on twitter right?
“I don’t know about you, but when I look at an online map and see outlines of buildings, I get a little frustrated…..” – Extract from ur blog on the new feature in Google Maps.
“I don’t know about you, but when I see a link to a picture shared on Twitter, I almost always click on it…..” – Extract from this article.
Do you notice the pattern you started these articles with? Siegler, cmon you need to relax and take things easy and refresh your mind. Your articles are nice. But I honestly feel that you might be in need of a small vacation, or some refreshment. Do you stack beer at the TC office? Grab one..
cheers
Hmm some twitpicporn there, hot.
Borat?
No I clicked through a bit and before you know it, full on porn! Looks like its from a Twitter account of an adult “photographer”.
There’s more to Twicsy other than Porn, well at least a different type of porn: http://twicsy.c.../?search=fiddme
yup! twicsy is a lot more interesting if you type in “nude”, or “boob”.
I’m warning you guys that this site is Not Safe For Work at all.
depends on where you work i suppose. safe for my work!
Thanks!
When a site is NSFW, I am more likely to click it. Good writeup.
i couldnt help myself not to search for “nude”
Can anyone say copyright infringement?
How does it differ from something like google image search?
Google Image search doesn’t take you to a page with a large image on google.com when you click on the thumbnail — it takes you to the page the actual picture is on.
I might be dense, but i fail to see how on earth copyright comes into it. The pics almost in all cases are uploaded by the person who took it, with presumably the intent to share since its on twitpic. If you take it and pass off as your own, then there might be infringement. How does viewing a pic constitute infringement, whether through google search or twicsy?! So what if google takes you to the original page? twicsy’s also providing the twit links where it was originally posted, not that any of it is pertinent really to copyright.
You are dense. Just because you post a link of a page that contains a copyrighted picture to Twitter doesn’t mean you given anyone the right to scrape the picture of that page and repost it on their site, whether they link to the original or not.
You can opt out of having your pictures indexed by Google. So far, you can’t on Twicsy.
Read the google copyright case. You’ll see why that was fair use, and this is not.
This is a cool niche feature. I don’t think it’s worth any money, but cool none the less.
BTW, if you missed this Buy.com is selling guitar hero 3 for PS3 for 1 day only for $29 with free shipping on ebay. I’ve actually been waiting for it to be this cheap before I bought it, so i finally picked one up.
sorry, the link got messed up on that. It’s brand new and includes the controller. Normally I don’t share deals, but this one really rocks.
BTW, good job on this Twitter feature, it’s nice.
The SEO junkies just got a spiffy new toy.
@Sean – yup, this could be the world’s new amateur twitpron search engine.
This was a pretty major trend with LiveJournal [1] and the popular XScreenSaver project [2] as well.
LiveJournal later included a security wrapper for all posted references to imagery for those that wish to opt-out [3] from the latest service.
Ah, collectively passive voyeurism at its finest.
[1] http://www.live.../latest-img.bml (warning: xml content)
[2] http://www.jwz....lage/webcollage (warning: perl content)
[3] http://communit...og/1408099.html
Site partially responsive, looks like TC peak
Sorry everyone, we did have a little meltdown, working on getting things back to full functionality. I guess I’m not going to the beach tomorrow…
Thanks for the writeup MG!
I actually prefer TweetPicGrid: http://tweetgri...witpicgrid?r=in
It’s part of the very awesome TweetGrid interface.
Dudes, Twitter addiction just killed some chick in Romania!
http://www.aust...ex.php?id=14023
There must have Flickr tools for twitter!
Twitcaps (http://twitcaps.com) is a better version of this.
err Twitcaps
http://twicsy.com/ is down at teh moment and shows
“An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.”
When visiting it now from Australia
http://www.PicFog.com offers real time image search, as well.
There is a similar service here: http://picfog.com/
I think it’s better in some ways.
i never thought i would be gripped by something like this, but it is kind of addictive…..i know, it is bizarre that i am admitting this. nice tool. it might catch on.
Porn?
better than flickr ?
A sea of photos the world does not need… and some of it can make one sick…
Office Recovery Software to repair corrupt word, excel, powerpoint, access, publisher files.
very nice search. lots of pictures