Life Journaling: Twitter, Photo’s & Geo Tag’s
// February 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
I have been searching high and low for a way to keep my son’s movements so that he can one day re-live his childhood memories. The ones that you tend not to remember between the ages of 0 to 5. Keeping a journal would just be too tedious and i know i would never be able to follow through. So i needed something a little bit simpler. And the answer was obvious – micro-blogging.
I love twitter, so i set out on a task to tweet on the little and the major things that goes on in his life that hopefully will one day bring a smile to his face when he’s much older. The problem i have with this is that its difficult to limit it to 140 words.
So off i went again looking for a way – still using my favorite means of micro-blogging, Twitter. With the 140 word limit, i started including photo’s to my tweet’s and posted the photo’s to Flickr. I recently came about the problem of reaching my 200 photo limit and my attempts to upgrade to the Pro account have so far been futile. Yahoo customer support is really hopeless.
Another problem came about. Where are my photo’s going to be stored. And i was a fussy man. I wanted all the beauty of geo-tagging so that when we look back at the pictures, we’ll at least know where it was taken. It took me 3 days to find a solution.
The solution was simple. Moby Picture. It fitted my needs perfectly. Many people use Moby Picture as an alternative to Twitpic and various other twitter picture hosting. So here is a complete list on how i’m keeping things that will hopefully form great memories.
First, the client. I use an iPhone and i don’t see me changing phone type’s in the very near future.
Next, i use Twitter. Now, on the iPhone there are probably hundreds of apps that can be used. I’m using the app created and named Moby Picture for reasons that will become very apparent on why i use this app rather than those more popular ones like Tweetie, Twitter Fon, etc. Actually i do use Tweetie 2 as a back up, when i just need to tweet a 140 character sentence that does not have any pictures.
Now, before we go to the juicy part, i think i’ll need to explain the backup. Have you tried searching for a tweet you tweeted 2 months ago? Impossible right. So, for this project to be even remotely successful, we’ll need to get all the tweet’s to a safe place. To do this, i’m using twistory to export all my tweets to Google Calendar. So what i get is year, month and date on when i tweeted a tweet. Not only that. It comes with all the goodies of a google search engine, built in. Neat right?
Now comes the part of storing my photo’s with the sweetness of geo-tagging. For that, i use Moby Picture’s Moby Map. Hence, that is why i use their app to tweet photos that have pictures in it. To get all this done, signup for a free Moby Picture account. Once you have done that, on the right tool bar, you will see your username, click on it. Once you have done that, you will see a link to Moby Maps. You can also use this url to directly access your Moby Maps -http://www.mobypicture.com/user/yourusername/maps.
Although there are many apps out there that can post a picture to Moby Picture, here’s the pickle. Non of the geo-tags seem to work with Moby Picture. I’m sure that someday soon, this won’t be an issue. But today, it is an issue – at least for me.
Today i sleep a happy man, knowing that i have finally overcome this hurdle. But tomorrow, another issue will need to be looked at – how safe are my pictures with Moby Picture? I’ll leave that one for another day. Today, i celebrate the glory.
Do you have a better and simpler way to do this? Do let me know your ways.
