Two fun Twitter hacks: voice-to-text tweets and file-sharing

I love Twitter. Dave Winer wrote that "Twitter is a coral reef, and Pownce is just a shipwreck." For aspiring non-tech-inclined geeks like me, Twitter offers endless possibilities for just messing around with stuff for no reason at all. Here are my latest two ideas. Maybe someone will actually read this (unlikely, but who knows) and find them useful (probably even unlikelier).

First, the voice-to-text tweeting. There's one way to do this that works, another way that doesn't, and neither is perfect. First, the easy way, the one that works. Open an account on Jott, then check out the new (?) "Jott links" feature. (I just discovered this today, and their blog seems to suggest that it is, indeed, quite new.) Give Jott your Twitter credentials. Then you can phone Jott, say "Twitter" when asked you you want to send your Jott message to, and speak your tweet. ("Speak your tweet" -- has a kind of a ring to it, doesn't it?) Jott will transcribe your message and post it to Twitter within a few minutes at most. I find their transcription is, well, not perfect, but pretty impressive, especially given that the times I'm most likely to use such a service I'm usually talking on a cell phone in a noisy environment (plus I have a very low-voiced, muttering way of talking). Anyhow, you'll get a tweet that looks like this:


The problem with this is that if your transcribed text goes over the 140-character limit, it seems to be just gone, and in fact i think the limit is lower because Jott adds "powered by http://jott.com" to the end of each tweet. For this reason it occurred to me you might do the following. Go to Twittermail and enter your Twitter login credentials. You'll get back a long, convoluted-looking email address. Any text you send to this address will be Twittered. The nice feature of Twittermail is that if you send more than 140 characters, they'll archive it for you and insert a link into your tweet, with a result that looks like this:

If you click on the tinyurl link, you'll see this:

So, take that Twittermail email address and add it to your Jott contacts. Then, instead of Jotting to "Twitter," you can Jott to "Twittermail," and it'll send your whole email to that address, and whatever goes over the 140-character limit will get archived.

Well, it doesn't work, because the email that gets sent ends up looking like this:

Not exactly a text-only email, you see. Apparently this simply overwhelms Twittermail. When I tried it, nothing ever got posted to Twitter.

So, if Jott would provide an option to send mail to certain contacts as text-only, wouldn't that be great? Jott, are you listening?

The other thing I came up with is to use Twitter as a file-sharing platform. Here's a sample tweet:

This is pretty simple but requires several steps. First, open a Box.net account. They have decent free ones available. Upload the file you want to share. Tag it "post:twitter" or whatever. Then, you need to enable public sharing (i.e., publishing) for that tag. The only way I could figure out to do this -- it's a pain -- is by going into my display preferences, and asking to be shown the "old" file view (or by logging in and going to the URL www.box.net/browse#mybox). This view displays a column of tags down the left-hand side of the screen. You can then click on the pulldown menu next to the tag you want to publish and select "Share." It'll give you a page URL and as feed URL. Copy the feed URL. It will look like this: http://www.box.net/shared/t_iupej4pkc1/rss.xml Replace the word "shared" with "public." Really. Then you'll have a working feed URL. I'm guessing tag-based sharing isn't really supported by Box any more since their redesign, but this seems to work anyhow. Try it. http://www.box.net/public/t_iupej4pkc1/rss.xml Paste this feed into Twitterfeed and there you go. Anything you upload to Box.net and tag with post:twitter will automatically get published to your twitter stream. Eat your heart out, Pownce.

These instructions are pretty telegraphic; if you need clarification, let me know (comment or twitter or email or whatever).

Twittergrams + Podlinez = computer-free micropodcasting? Not quite

Podlinez is a free service which allows you to assign a phone number to a podcast feed (presumably audio only). Once you've set it up, anyone can dial the phone number associated with the feed and hear the latest audio post. I just ran my Twittergram feed through Podlinez (link) and added the Podlinez phone number to the "Title" text on Dave Winer's Twittergram-by-phone page. So, now, when I call in a post, Twitter contacts see:

In theory, this means that if you subscribe to my tweets via SMS updates, this message will arrive as a text message on your phone, and you'll be able to hear my audio update simply by calling that phone number. And, in fact, it works, but with a pretty crippling limitation, bad enough that I'll have to take that phone number back out of the standard text. Podlinez, which is built for a very different sort of service, apparently doesn't poll for feed updates very often. It took about 55 minutes before my audio message could actually be heard at that number. Until then, Podlinez was still playing my previous audio update, which was about two weeks old. I suppose I could change the text to read "Phone post (call 718-977-5949 after 1 hour)", but that'd be silly. The point of Twitter is immediacy and speed.

Well, it was an interesting idea.

Using Flickr to post images to Twitter

Here's how I post images from my cameraphone to Twitter.

1.) What you'll need: accounts at Flickr and Twitter, to begin with.
2.) In Flickr, choose a tag by which to associate photos to Twitter. I went with post:twitter. You can also choose to have all your Flickr photos sent to Twitter, in which case you skip this.
3.) Tag your photo with the tag you've chosen.
4.) Go to the page for that tag. Do this by clicking the tag name on the right-hand side of the Flickr photo page.
5.) Grab the feed URL for that tag. Do this by right-clicking on the orange RSS icon in the lower left corner of the page, and then select "Copy link location" or "Copy shortcut."
6.) Go to Twitterfeed and set up an account. Follow the on-screen instructions to "create a new twitterfeed."
7.) Once you're at the screen shown above, enter your Twitter credentials and paste the feed URL you just copied into the field labelled "RSS feed URL."
8.) Adjust the other options as desired. To my mind it makes most sense for each tweet to include the title and description as well as the tinyurl link (as above) but that is optional.

Now you're all set up. If you want one of your Flickr photos to go to Twitter, just tag it "post:twitter" or whatever you've chosen.

If you want to post a photo from your cameraphone to Twitter, do this:
10.) Make sure you have the "post by email" address corresponding to your account in your phone's address book. If you don't know this address, this link (if you're logged in) should tell you.
11.) From your phone, send a photo to this address. The subject line of your email or MMS should include: (a) first, the title you want the photo to have, and (b) after the title, a space, then the word "tags", a colon, and then your chosen Twitter tag. In my case, the subject line of the email would look like this: My clever photo title tags:post:twitter. If you want a description for the photo, include that as the body of the message. You can also include the "tags: post:twitter" code in the body of the message if you like, but it must be on a line by itself. Here's Flickr help on the same issue.
12.) That's it. Follow all these steps, and you should see a tweet posted to your account shortly that looks something like the following: New photo post: My clever photo title. Nathan Rein posted a photo... http://tinyurl.com/123abc or whatever.

Here's an example of one of my tweets. Here's another.

The reason I posted this is because I am following Dave Winer's project to feed Flickr photos to Twitter, and it seems you could approximate the same result using these tools. He is giving out ten invites as of this afternoon. His relevant blog posts are here and here, and the Twittergram page for the new service is here. Now, I'm not a technical wizard, so it's quite likely I am missing some key component here, but what does his project do that Twitterfeed can't do? I'm guessing it's quicker and more reliable. Anything else?

Update

I built a simple Yahoo! Pipe to strip the extra boilerplate text out of the feed ("Nathan Rein posted a photo..."). To use it, go here, enter your Flickr identity and tag information, and run the pipe. Then click the "subscribe" button and grab the feed URL. Proceed with Twitterfeed as described above.

A sample tweet using this pipe is here.