YouTube Integrates Twitter, Google Reader and Facebook; Flickr embraces Twitter
Popular photo uploading service like Twitpic, successful apps on Facebook and other mashup services tell a very important tale. They have become popular not just because they are convenient and add value to the user’s time on a site; but also because they provide such seamless and smooth integration between our favourite hang out spots on the internet. Today saw two very important updates where prominent photo, video, microblogging platforms and social networks embraced each other. This not only helps the users in navigation, but also helps one service to have a visibility in the other service.
A win-win situation for everyone I must say.
YouTube has added a small feature with vast implications; it is now letting you update your Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader accounts as soon as you upload a new video on your YouTube account! Pretty neat, eh?
This of course means that your friends will be seeing a lot more of your YouTube updates in their home page feeds, making the whole process a lot more viral. Social bookmarking and usability have always been about getting more visibility and more users to sign up, which YouTube has just done in a very simple manner. YouTube is using Facebook Connect and Twitter Oauth to make this happen.
Moving onto Flickr, it looks as if they have also realized the potential of sharing links over the popular microblogging platform Twitter. Flickr members can now sign up for the Flickr Twitter Beta which will allow them to link their Flickr and Twitter accounts using Oauth again. Basically, every time you upload a new photo by email, a tweet will be send out from your Twitter account to all your followers! This is only available for uploads via email right now, but will soon be extended (hopefully). Flickr gives every user a special @photos.flickr.com email address which allows them to upload photos directly into their Flickr stream via email attachments. If you want to Tweet a photo, you can add “2twitter” at the end of your special email.
It’s a bit cumbersome and might not be utilized by new and less knowledgeable members, but once you set it up, the feature works pretty well. Flickr is using its own shortened URL (http://flic.kr) unlike YouTube and can be a very important toll when the whole Twitterville lives in only 140 characters.
One more thing different from YouTube here is that Flickr is allowing its users to choose which kind of photos to upload, which I think is the right way to look at it. A lot more seems to be coming from Flickr side in this regards, stay tuned!
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