Earlier this year, we announced the Eye-Fi Manager’s new notification feature. We added this feature to give our users direct feedback (via email or SMS) into what their cards were doing: starting an upload session, completing an upload session, or experiencing trouble during an upload session.
While it’s great to be notified via email or SMS (text messaging) that all of your photos have uploaded, your friends won’t have a clue that you’ve uploaded new photos. Since the point of photo sharing is to let friends and family enjoy your pictures, you should be able to easily notify them as well. To that end, the Eye-Fi Manager now supports a third notification option — Twitter.
Why Twitter?
Millions of people use Twitter to post updates about where they are, what they’re doing and, occasionally, when they’ve uploaded photos. We thought it would be cool if the Eye-Fi card posted the ubiquitous “I’ve just uploaded some photos!” update to your friends automatically.
Twitter direct messages vs. Twitter updates
Twitter offers two types of messages: private “direct messages” and public updates. The Eye-Fi Manager allows you to select one or both types when setting up your Twitter notification. Since direct messages are private, you can use them as an alternative to email or SMS for receiving feedback about the card’s upload progress.
On the other hand, Twitter updates, or ‘tweets’, are public — your Twitter followers will see them immediately. The Eye-Fi card will post a tweet after all of your photos successfully uploaded to your favorite photo sharing site. The tweet will include the number of photos uploaded, the name of the photo sharing site, and a link to the last photo uploaded.
I prefer having both types of Twitter messages enabled with my Eye-Fi card. The Twitter direct messages show up in Twitterific on my phone and they’re free to receive unlike SMSes which cost a few cents each. I also rely on the tweets to instantly let my friends know when I’ve uploaded new photos.
Tip: If you install Twitter’s Facebook application, your Facebook friends will see your tweets and know when you’ve uploaded new photos.
Customizing the tweet
If you enable Twitter notifications, the default tweet will look something like this:
Uploaded 11 photos to Flickr. http://tinyurl.com/43scoz
The Eye-Fi Manager will let you customize the tweet text however you like. We’ve provided variables for the dynamic portions of the message: $C (the upload count), $S (the photo sharing site name), and $L (link to the last photo). Everything else in the tweet can be completely customized!
For example, I’ve changed my tweet text to look like this:
Just Eye-Fi’d some pics to Flickr http://tinyurl.com/43scoz
I did that by customizing my tweet in the Eye-Fi Manager like this:
We hope you enjoy the new Twitter notifications as much as we do!
