if you can’t beat them, beat them with sticks
what happens when you have a great idea and somebody else comes up with the same idea at approximately the same time? frustrating..
so today, in an ironic feat of web-searchification, while working on my very own foto:blip, i discovered a lovely little app that does nearly the same thing as foto:blip. note, nearly.
clearly i’ve been beaten to the punch in providing a way to use photos instead of words to share the play by play of your life.
so what to do now? beat them with sticks!
the key differentiation that i see right now is that TwitPic (what a silly name) is a bolt-on application. it connects with the Twitter API and (sortof) extends the functionality of Twitter. not a bad idea at all. Twitter has a large and growing userbase. but, i believe that what is really needed to take the next step with microbloggery is to have a completely new application which is built from the ground up to work with images. while two Twitter add-on clients support TwitPic, allowing the posted photo to be viewed directly in the client, other venues such as the Twitter web site and the all-important Twitter Facebook application merely show a link to your photo posted via TwitPic. degrades nicely for those clients, but how will it bode for the visually-inclined user? not so well.
foto:blip has, from the very beginning, been designed to use photos as the users’ primary means of communication. to emphasize that point, photo captions are limited to a short 50 characters. we want users to communicate with their images. to do this, it is a necessity that every viewer can see the posted images alongside the caption.
i’ll be having a closer look at TwitPic shortly as I continue working on foto:blip. perhaps it will inspire me even more.
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