Hello again! Today we are announcing some new features to the Twicli service.
We've put together lots of feedback and suggestions and we've done our best to implement them. We would like to thank everyone who has helped in the release of these latest features.
New Features
Twicli Staff are proud to announce the following interesting additions to the service:
- Tag your friends into videos. The ability to tag users into photos is definitely one of our favorite features so we now let you tag your friends and followers into your video files too.
Example of video tagging
- Tag your friends into audio. Same as above, you can tag twitter users into the audio files you upload.
Example of audio tagging
- Add to Favorites. Keep track of your favorite photos, video and audio. Now you can save content to your favorites so you can easily find them later.
- New notification system. We've had enough of @TwicliBot sending notifications automatically. Now you choose whether to notify users when you tag them into photos etc.
- Allowed email addresses. As an extra security measure you can now set up to 5 allowed email addresses. We will only accept email uploads if they are sent from one of your allowed emails.
- Embed photos. When viewing a photo you can now select the HTML code and embed it into your website.
- New actions bar. We've tidied up the photo, video and audio pages by putting all the action buttons at the top of the page. This looks so much nicer and makes more sense.
Example of a photo page
- View comments. You can now see a list of all the comments you've posted on photos, videos etc.
Example of comment listing
We've also been working hard on fixing various bugs in the site. As always, please contact us if you notice anything out of place.
With these new features we will be updating out API shortly to match. You can see our API documentation here.
If you are interested in using the API please follow @TwicliAPI (remember we offer free advertising to developers/applications that integrate our service).
For updates and announcements please follow @TwicliStaff.
With any enquiries please email staff@picli.com.
Enjoy!
We have been working hard on a brand new version of Twicli.
Your feedback was helpful greatly appreciated. We've done our best to implement all your suggestions.
What's new?
Twicli Staff are proud to announce the following interesting additions to the service:
- Support for audio uploaded via the web and via email. If your phone supports audio recording and email - this couldn't be easier.
Example of audio
- Tag your twitter friends into your photos. Similar to Facebook's user tagging feature but with more control.
Example of user tagging
- Friend Activity shows you what your twitter friend's have been uploading.
Screenshot of friend activity
- New Multimedia tweet box with full control over how your tweet will appear. This is the easiest way to upload photos/video and audio and then send a tweet via the web.
Screenshot of multimedia tweetbox
- Mixed content sets. Don't spam your friends with 5 pictures in a row. Upload a group of photos into a set and tweet one URL that leads to your content. You can mix photos, videos and audio in a set and this also works via email. Great for sending a batch of photos + videos at the end of the day.
Example of a mixed content set
- Your twitter background + profile image. The transition from Twitter to Twicli is almost seamless. All images are cached on the Picli static servers so if you change your background on Twitter, your theme wont break on Twicli.
Example of a user profile on Twicli
- Geodata and Google Maps. Photos are now automatically geotagged (but users must opt in to enable this to protect their privacy).
Example of a photo with geo-data
- View all sizes of a photo.
Example of photo sizes
- Higher quality video. Previously Twicli's video formatting was an experimental system. They are proud to announce higher quality video conversion. Your videos now have thumbnail images to help
Example of a video
- Larger file sizes. In the past the filesize limit for videos was 50MB. To celebrate this new version of Twicli the limit for videos is now 100MB. Audio files can be up to 50MB in size.
- The Twicli API is currently being tested by various developers and plans to launch soon integrated into various apps. Twicli staff encourage developers to follow TwicliAPI if they are interested in testing the API methods.
The new version of Twicli was released on Monday 17th August 2009.
For updates and announcements please follow @TwicliStaff
With any enquiries please email staff@picli.com
Upcoming Features
- Tag users into videos
- Tag users into audio files
- Facebook Integration
- API and application support
- iPhone App
Twicli is a free service that allows users to upload both photos and videos through the Twicli platform and display them to their friends on Twitter.
Twicli has been designed with user experience in mind. We want the site to look and feel like Twitter offering a seemingly seamless transition from one site to another.
Users can upload photos and videos and comment on each, these comments are then broadcast on twitter via the means of @replies. The Twicli frontpage features the most recent content uploaded by Twitter users.
Twicli is powered by Picli's social photography technology alongside integration with the brilliant Twitter API.
Why is Twicli better than other Twitter photo/video apps?
It does both.
Interface - Twicli has been designed to ‘feel like twitter’ - you can import your twitter background and colours onto Twicli - providing a smooth transition between Twitter and Twicli.
Sets - Twicli supports sets of photos and videos, and you can mix both content types in a set. Don't spam your friends with photo after photo, just upload them all at once into a set and your friends will see all your content from one tweet. Perfect for photo/video blogging your trips - now you can send a lot more photos at once (without annoying anyone and losing followers)
New Trends - Twicli generates it's own trends. Meaning you see what trending topics are hot
rightnow in regards to photos and videos - not the general Twitter trends.
View All Sizes - As user's photos are uploaded they are resized, but the full resolution version is always available. Also, being able to see what image sizes are available makes it easier for bloggers to grab a smaller size if needed.
OAuth - Twicli is one of the first apps to fully integrate Twitter's implementation of OAuth. Twicli is totally safe and secure as users never need to enter their login information.
iPhone 3.0 Compatible - We're very excited about iPhone 3.0. Once it's released, creating photo/video sets on Twicli will be a breeze as you can attach more than 1 piece of content to an email.
Videos - Upload your videos to Twicli through the site or via email. There is no limit on video length (like some other services), only on filesize (50MB).
Powered by Picli - Twicli is powered by it's parent company Picli, established in 2006.
User List - See a list of integrated Twitter users who use Twicli. A cute little feature.
Why this is cool?
Users can use Twicli to microblog using video and high resolution pictures without ever going near a computer.
The news is full of user generated content. In fact, the most memorable pictures and videos of certain big news events, say the 7/7 tube bombings in London or the recent G20 protests have come from mobile phones. There is one problem with this though, the people filming the content have to go back to their computer in order to upload the content to the internet thus can creating a delay in delivery. For example, it wasn't for days after the event that the footage of a police officer pushing Ian Tomlinson surfaced.
Twicli could bridge that gap. Users can send in footage from the actual scene minutes after something has occurred. There is nothing better than Twitter to blow something up virally and by uploading to Twicli users could have their content seen by thousands before they even arrive home.
Furthermore, with Twicli's own trends system, if there are a large group of users submitting content at once from a major event, Twicli would recognize this and promote that trend to the front page. Just like twitter.
Upcoming Features
- Google Maps integration
- iPhone App and integration
- Comment moderation
- Video thumbnails
- Site translation into various languages
- Audio
- Favorites
- New polished design that replicates the look and feel of twitter.
- API
Feel free to follow our progress @twiclistaff on Twitter.
For the past 3 months we have been been working incredibly hard coding and designing the latest version of Picli. We are proud to announce a brand new release on March 29th, our 2 year anniversary.
We have completely recoded and redesigned everything.
There is so much to talk about, please read on for an insight into our best version yet.
Interface
We have scrapped our old layout and rebuilt the design from scratch, keeping usability in mind. We feel the new layout is very intuitive and you should be able to navigate very easily. Things to remember:
- The top menu relates to the site on a global level (Showcase, Upcoming etc).
- The menu below (when logged in) relates to all of your content.
- The left side of the page will always contain the primary page content.
- The right side of the page contains option menus, and seconary content.
But enough about the ergonomics of the design. Let's move onto some of the new and improved functionality.
Uploading photos
We are happy to announce a brand new way of uploading photos on Picli. Now you can upload up to 10 photos at a time and then describe them in step 2. We've redesigned the forms to make them as effective as possible.
Publishing & Privacy
In the past when you uploaded a photo it was automatically entered into our voting system. From now on you can upload as many photos as you like and choose to publish them (enable voting) at whatever time you like. For example, you can take a group of photos at the beach, upload them all at once, then publish one per day if you so wish. Your unpublished photos can be seen using the display options on your photo listing.
You may want to keep your photos private. Well, now you can. And that's not all - you can even make your photos visible only to your friends on Picli.
Sets
As well as our tagging system you can further sort your photos into sets. If you've just taken 5 photos of a brilliant sunrise you can add all 5 into a Hawaii Sunrise set. But aswell as categorizing by location/place you might chose to create a set for all of your black&white photography. It's up to you. Sets combined with our new publishing settings means you can now upload and share all the photos from any particular shoot, yet only publish those which you feel are the best.
Image formats
Picli now supports your fullsize original photos. Previously, all photos were resized to a feeble 580 pixels - this is no longer the case. When using the standard picli free account (more about accounts later) - thanks to the new photo sizes pages you will be able to enjoy photos at their original size and quality (provided they stay below 5mb per image).
Furthermore we have increased our image format support to include both PNG and GIF files.
Cameras
When uploading your photos to Picli you can now associate each photo with the camera used to take the picture. We have compiled a comprehensive default list of cameras to choose from, however, should yours not be listed you can add it to the directory. This data is then displayed in the 'Statistics' area on each photo page.
This is a basic feature for now, however, once we have enough data we plan to expand this functionality. Each camera will become a link that will bring up all pictures taken with that specific camera (just like browsing tags).
We are also planning to include areas where which users can discuss the pros, cons, tips and tricks etc of each camera.
Licenses
We're happy to say that all picli users can now license their images under a variety of Creative Commons licenses, or the default all rights reserved license. More about this here.
Voting & Favorites
Something we had never considered was the ability to actually see what you had voted for. This obvious feature was requested by a number of users and has finally been implemented.
You'll see a nice new heart icon for your favorite photos. We changed this because we intend to use the old silver & gold star icons for picli club and pro accounts. More about this later...
Prodem
Prodem (promotion/demotion), the name given to our promotion algorithm has undergone some changes. Various protocols such as our 'Lockdown' functionality are now in effect to catch people attempting to game the promotion system. Read more about this here.
Notifications
We asked ourselves "what do users want to see when they login?". The answer was pretty easy. They want to see what's been happening to their photos while they've been away.
Now you are given a clean list of who has voted on your photos, who has added your photos to their favorites, which photos have been promoted and various other interesting alerts. If you don't want to see all of these, you can easily customize which notifications appear, or have them sent to your email inbox instead. Please click here for more information.
Profiles
We've rebuilt user profiles and actually made them useful. Previouly, they weren't really doing much.
Now when you visit a user's profile you can see their photos, favorites, sets, friends etc. You can also leave them a comment if you've added that person (and they've accepted you) as a friend.
Friends
We want our users to start talking to each other and to do this we've built friendships into Picli. This version acts as the base of our coming social functionality - we have a lot more to implement in future versions that will really help photographers and photography enthusiasts connect and interact with the people who inspire them.
We hope these features will allow our users to share their work and build new relationships.
With friends comes friend requests. The is now an area where incoming requests can be found. More about friends here and more about requests here.
Themes
One our old site we let you choose from 2 themes, a simple default green and the same thing in blue. All that is about to change.
We now support 12 default backgrounds, designed by us and if you hate them all then you can now upload your own background which will show on all of your pages.
We're really excited to be able to see some of your creative design talent aswell as your photography skills.
Languages
We used to support French as a language on Picli. Unfortunately due to our new release being brand new - a lot of our old translations have become redundant and do not apply. We are currently working on a 'french - basic' version that translates all of the most important text - navigation which we will implement as soon as possible, however, a full translation is still a while away.
As noted before this entire site has been thought up, designed, coded, written and dreamt about by just the two of us - Sam Street and Sean Miller. We don't have an office and have created this site entirely from our homes. Translation is a big job for two guys that only really speak English and very basic French so we're having to turn this feature over to our community - if you're willing to help translate the site into your native language (any language at all) we would really appreciate it. Please click here to express your interest.
Picli Accounts
We are announcing paid accounts today - but they will not be released for a few months while we finalize the details.
We really want to stress that the current free account has way more features than ever before - we would never charge our users for something that was once free.
However, if we want the site to grow into something potentially incredible we're going to have to monetize certain areas in order to pay for our server costs.
We want to offer users a way to upgrade and unlock extra functionality on Picli. In the spirit of openness we are going to announce exactly what our current price plan will be (see below). However, none of this is final. This is a work in progress and we will be taking your feedback into consideration.
Releasing a paid service without asking our users to help would be stupid and against the principles that we've built this site upon.
Below are our initial pricing plans. They are subject to change, based on the feedback you send us.
Picli Free
- You can upload 100MB of photos each month.
- 5MB per photo.
- We will display ALL of your photos (no 200 image cap).
- Upload your full size photos (providing they are under 5mb).
- Unlimited bandwidth.
- Unlimited photos, sets, comments, tags etc.
- Unlimited glory.
Picli Club $9.95 yearly
- You can upload 200MB of photos each month.
- 10MB per photo.
- Browse with no adverts on your pages (photos, favorites etc).
- Priority support from Picli staff.
- A cool icon next to your name.
- Dedicated Club Showcase gallery.
- Access to the Club Forums.
(yes, Forums are coming).
- There is more.. but the features they relate to will be announced in the future.
- Unlimited glory.
Picli Pro $24.95 yearly
- You can upload unlimited photos.
- 24MB per photo.
- Browse with no adverts anywhere.
- Priority support (over Club users) from Picli staff.
- An even cooler icon next to your name.
- Dedicated Pro Showcase gallery.
- Access to the Pro Forums
(yes, Forums are coming).
- There is more.. but the features they relate to will be announced in the future.
- Unlimited glory.