Are we in for a micro blogging war? Soon after Twitter enabled native photo uploading feature for most Twitter accounts, TwitPic founder Noah Everett announced the launch of Heello a complete Twitter clone which works the same way as Twitter does. One hundred percent!

Here is how Heello works. You create an account at Heello.com and can follow people whose updates you want to read. Uh… in Heello’s language, listen.

Next, you can post tweets pings and they will appear on your public Heello timeline. That’s right, your updates in Heello are called Pings.

Your listeners can send a reply to your ping and mutual following allows you to send private messages to your listeners. Retweeting updates of your listeners has been renamed to Echoso you can echo the pings of your followers. There I screwed it again, it should read listeners.

The big deal here is that Heello comes with photo and video sharing capabilities out of the box, with more features coming soon. Here is how the ping box at Heello looks like

You guessed it the character limit of a ping is 140.

Check out Heello’s live stream to understand how public Hello timelines look:

Anyone who has a Twitter account can blindly say that Heello is a complete Twitter clone. Neither Noah Everett is denying this statement.

If Twitter can compete with its developers without fair notice, then why can’t we?he said.

Fair argument, Noah. It is just a matter of time when Twitter’s mobile apps will support native photo uploads and suddenly, all the TwitPics, yFrogs and third party image sharing sites are put out of business. When it comes to sticking with a service, Internet users are not that loyal to be honest.

The Heello team is gearing up for a full fledged war on Twitter in the coming months. Heello will support SMS integration, video uploads, checkins, mobile apps and an exclusive feature called Channels. Channels will let Heello users group themselves together and users would be able to   Listen’ to a Channel to see all their pings at one place.

Another fancy name of Twitter lists?

This is Sparta!

PyShare is a application for Linux which makes sharing pictures and other files very simple. The current version (0.6.1) of the application supports uploading images to TwitPic and ImageShack and non-image files to RapidShare. After uploading the files, users can copy the URLs to share it with others, directly from the application.

Features

After installation, the application acts as a Nautilus extension and users can right click on the pictures/files and upload it from within Nautilus. The Nautilus menu for PyShare consist of the following:

• PyShare_GTK – Selecting this will open the PyShare window. From the PyShare window, users can configure PyShare, look at the history etc. Users can also drop files on the PyShare window to upload them as well. Changing the PyShare configuration from this window never worked for me though.
• sendDesktopScreenshot - The name is fairly self explanatory. On selecting this, PyShare will take a screenshot and upload it to either TwitPic or ImageShack.
• sendFiles – This will upload the selected files to the appropriate service. If the selected files are images, they will be uploaded to TwitPic or ImageShack. However, non-image files will be uploaded to RapidShare.
• sendWindowScreenshot – This is somewhat like sendDesktopScreenshot. Instead of uploading screenshot of the desktop, this will only upload screenshot of the selected window.

After using the application for almost a day, I feel that it still has a lot of rough edges. I certainly find the sendFiles function useful. However, for taking and uploading screenshots, I would prefer Shutter to PyShare. Shutter has more features and is more polished. I would certainly welcome support for Flickr and imgur as well.

Installation

If you want to install PyShare download it from GNOME-Looks.org, extract it and run the file install.sh. Then install python-pycurl and scrot.

If you prefer to do it from the command like interface, open the Terminal and execute the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pycurl scrot
$ wget http://gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-files/100952-PyShare0.6.1.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf 100952-PyShare0.6.1.tar.bz2
$ cd PyShare0.6.1
$ ./install.sh

Now restart Nautilus and you should see PyShare on the right-click menu.

Sharing photos and videos with Twitter friends just got a little easier.

Photo sharing startup Twitpic, has just added support for video uploads, which means now you can upload videos to your Twitpic account and share the TwitcPic video URL with your Twitter friends and followers.

Adding videos to Twitpic’s sharing arsenal makes complete sense, everyone wants a central place for media uploads and nobody wants to fumble through a dozen websites – one for photos, one for videos and another one for files. While users can always upload videos to their YouTube account and share the YouTube video URL on Twitter, but considering TwitPic’s  growing  popularity among it’s existing user base, this move was much sought after.

Uploading videos to Twitpic is quite easy, go to twitpic.com/upload, connect your Twitter account and choose a video file from your computer. Then add a message and click “Upload”. The video will be uploaded and stored on your TwitPic account and a Tweet will be sent to your Twitter profile.

TwitPic also  supports  video and photo uploads from any email address. All you have to do is compose a new message, attach the video file and send the email to yoursecrettwitpicemail@twitpic.com. You can get your Twitpic secret email at the right corner of Twitpic’s video upload page.

The video page of Twitpic looks very basic in it’s spartan form, no embedding options are provided though. The reactions and mentions are organized as video comments, works quite the same way as for photos being shared on Twitpic.  Here is the launch video from TwitPic team.

I tried the embed code for TwitPic videos but it didn’t worked as it should. The code pulled in the first image from the video, users have to click the thumbnail image and watch the video on TwitPic.

Just one year back, TwitPic founder Noah Everett rejected a $10 Million buyout offer, the startup was making $1.5 million per year out of which 70% was net profit. Overtime, competing services like Yfrog, Vid.ly, Tvider have evolved who already support video and media uploads on Twitter. Thus, in order to survive the competition from rival sources, TwitPic had to do something about Video sharing.

Twitpic is in fact very late on embracing video uploads but considering it’s growing popularity, better late than never.

With Twitter experiencing tremendous growth, a lot of Twitter apps have also taken off. We recently heard about OneForty raising $1.9 Million for its Twitter app store and now there is talk of TwitPic being valued at more than $10 Million.

TwitPic is the most popular photo sharing site for Twitter with 6.5 million registered users and thousands of photos uploaded everyday. A recent interview with Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, reveals that TwitPic rejected a buyout offer of more than $10 Million last year. This interview with Mixergy further reveals that TwitPic makes around $1.5 Million every year out of which 70% is net profit.

It is a remarkable achievement for a service that was started by Noah single-handedly without any outside funding. Even now, the TwitPic team only consists of 4 people including Noah’s parents. Here is the complete interview.

If you want to know more about TwitPic, check out our previous posts here and here.

Twitpic the popular image share service for twitter, seems to have silently endured a database crash or had a severe glitch in their system. While I was browsing pictures on Twitpic, I saw that all the image view counters have been reset to 1.

All of the images in my Twitpic account seems to have some glitch, most of the image counters have been reset.

There is no official mention about any problems on the Twitpic blog. We have contacted the Twitpic team to get more information about this issue. We are still awaiting information from them. We will update this post once we get a official confirmation.

Update: TwitPic responded back with the following response:

Hello, we are currently working on a new view counter for our website. In the process, you image views may have been temporarily reset to 0. We are working to restore the correct image count.

Thank you for your patience.

Have you checked your Twitpic account? Did your image view counter get reset? Do let us know about it.

Mashable reports that Twitpic a popular image hosting service for twitter has been banned in China.

The ban is in place due to some viral photographs of a gas explosion in Beijing which were hosted on Twitpic.

If you are looking to access Twitpic in China you can make use of any of these free proxy servers.

Another solution is to use Freedom stick which allows you to browse the internet anonymously using Tor.

In addition to that you can also read our earlier guides on browsing the internet anonymously.

If you have any other methods for this please feel free to share it in the comments.