Twicli amps up options for pics and video sharing over Twitter

Picli.com, the photo sharing community site which relaunched in March, has just launched a free service to allow users to share photos and video with their Twitter friends. Of course, it’s called Twicli.

The service can handle photos, videos, sets and offers a sweet little user experience touch which ‘synchronises’ with the colours and background of your Twitter account – mainly because Picli founders Sam Street and Sean Miller want users to have a seemingly seamless transition from one site to the other.

It supports OAuth, an authentication platform which Twitter is encouraging developers to migrate to when developing apps that integrate with the service, as it lets users approve applications acting on their behalf without having to share their password.

The Twicli frontpage features the most recent content uploaded by Twitter users. It has its own trending topics view, which is specific to photos and videos, rather than the overall Twitter trends. Users can upload, tag and comment on photos and videos up to 50MB in size. In TwitPic stylee, comments are then broadcast on twitter via the means of @replies. Twitter’s changes to the way users can view @replies will affect this sharing, but Street says Twicli user feedback will determine how they adapt the service to account for this change.

Twicli offers a number of refinements around the burgeoning concept of sharing media over Twitter. For example, it supports sets which can mix pics and video, and then send just one tweet sharing the whole set, rather than flooding your tweet stream with individual images.

It resizes user photos as they’re uploaded but retains the full resolution version is always available. The service ostensibly targets this feature at bloggers, suggesting that being able to see what image sizes are available makes it easier for them to grab a smaller size if needed — users can assign usage rights for their images or video at the time of uploading.

The site was developed over a two week period and still has that new code smell and missing FAQ pages. Minor issues like this aside, Twicli joins the likes of Audioboo as services that encourage immediate multimedia microblogging, without having to return to a computer. The founders hopes Twicli will help mainstream media find relevant user-generated content in a much shorter timeframe — citing the example of the delay of days before the footage of a police officer pushing Ian Tomlinson surfaced.

Planned features for future versions of the service include an iPhone app, Google Maps integration, video thumbnails and an API.