Twitpic is a great easy way to share photo via Twitter.  A lot of twitter clients including desktop and iPhone/any mobile client support uploading pictures to twitpic.  It has gained the largest market share of any twitter centric photo sharing site (according to TC)  

Why am I talking about Twitpic?  Well I thought it would be cool visualize all the photos being shared on twitter, in realtime.  To that end I’m polling twitter search every 3 secs for the term “twitpic”  and publishing them to a xmpp pubsub server.  I built a super simple web interface that subscribes to that pubsub node, and displays new images as soon as they are received. (Technically there is a 5sec delay to let the image load, which makes the display run smoother.)  That is the largest delay, 5secs.  Once anyone uploads a picture to twitpic there is <10sec delay.  

I also include retweets of twitpics, so yes you will see duplicates, sometimes many on the same page, if that image is very popular, and being commented on / retweeted via twitpic. (look out for Miley Cyrus pictures taking over at times)

Check it out, let me know what you think.  I’m thinking about either adding a feature to reply via twitter to the pictures, or to discuss them via group chat on the web page itself.  Suggestions?

http://twitpic.flarify.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under coding, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.