TwitPic Review: Far From Picture Perfect
-remembers your login info
-automatically tweets your pic
-can't view your twitpic account
-most Twitter clients already offer this
Twitter users around the world have learned to love the world of 140-character microblogging, but that doesn’t mean a picture’s not worth a thousand words. Over the past year a number of photo-hosting services aimed at Tweeters have begun to pop up. Services like yfrog, Posterous, and img.ly have been gaining traction at an alarming rate, but none have proven as popular as TwitPic. It was only a matter of time until one of these services developed an app for the iPhone, but is it really necessary?
TwitPic for the iPhone lets you log in to your twitpic account, upload any photo stored on your device, comment on it and tweet it… and that’s it. Essentially TwitPic is a twitter client for twitpic photos only. In a world where Twitter clients offered zero photo functionality, this would be a godsend. But that’s not the world we live in. In fact, most iPhone Twitter clients not only offer image uploading features but allow you to pick from a list of hosts including twitpic.
The developers behind this app couldn’t have been oblivious to this fact, and yet their design decisions suggest just that very thing. Adding in twitpic specific features such as browsing your photo history or the photo history of other users would have added something fresh and new here, but such features are conspicuously absent. Going one step further they could have added in features that have been glaringly omitted from the site like a search functionality, but again, this app functions as little more than the image uploader you already have in a client.
Even as an image uploader, it’s far from perfect. Once you enter the portion of the process where you “comment” on your photo, giving the tweet text, you’re officially locked in. If, say, you change your mind at the last minute and decide you’d rather not post the image for whatever reason (logged into the wrong acct, don’t want to embarrass your wife, etc..), tough beans. There’s no way to cancel at that point. Even worse? Logging out of the app will then force your pic to post when you boot it back up.
If you’re looking for a quick way to pop your photos on to Twitter without booting up your Twitter client for whatever reason, this is definitely going to be a handy little tool. The problem? I can’t imagine anyone who that situation might apply to. It’s like entering the word processor market and offering a fantastic app for backspacing. No matter how good it is, it doesn’t matter — every app already does that. And this app? It’s a sub-par backspacer at best.
Considering there are so many options that already exist for uploading photos to twitpic, this app feels completely edundant. Had they added in some basic features like the ability to browse your twitpic acct or search through the photos of others, they may have had something worth checking out. As it stands though, TwitPic for the iPhone offers a tiny set of features that you’ll already find built into the vast majority of Twitter clients in the App Store.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe this app is an official TwitPic application.