A first peek at ink publishing to Flickr and Twitter

Here’s the first public look at InkGrams–a first pass tool for publishing ink messages to Flickr and optionally Twitter.

The basics? If you visit http://www.TabletPCPost.com/InkGram, shown here,

you are given the opportunity to sign into Flickr. Yes, you’ll need a Flickr account to save any drawings you make. There is no public Flickr account. Each person must have their own Flickr stream.

If you click right away on the “Ready to Draw” button, you’ll get a chance to sign into Flickr via Yahoo or Flickr itself. After you successfully sign in, you’ll be sent to the InkGram drawing page.

Before you sign into Flickr, you can also elect to have your future drawing sent to Twitter. You can either send the image to a shared, public Twitter stream of InkGrams or you can send the image to your own personal Twitter account. A third option is to not send the image to Twitter at all.

One more thing. Before we get started, you need to know that you’ll need Silverlight installed on your system.

OK, let’s say that we want to post our ink drawing to the public Twitter feed, at http://www.Twitter.com/InkGrams. You can do this by clicking on the radio button associated with “Post to the public InkGrams Twitter account.”

Now once we click on the “Ready to Draw” button we’re taken either to Flickr to sign in (if we’re not already signed in) or to the Drawing page shown here:

(Once again, you need Silverlight installed for this drawing page to appear.)

On the drawing page you can use one of four pens, a black one, a blue one, a red one, and a green one. There’s also an eraser tool and the eraser tip is supported for erasing ink strokes. Each of these tools corresponds to the first five icons shown in the Toolbar displayed at the top-left of the drawing page.

The last button is a publish button and will send your drawing to Flickr:

If everything goes correctly, you’ll get a confirmation dialog and when you visit your Flickr account you’ll see your ink drawing:

Notice that the Title and Description fields are set to “Test.” That’s because the code is still in test mode.

So far so good. The next step is to check out the Twitter InkGrams stream, to see if our drawing was successfully posted there. Since Twitter doesn’t currently support graphics, what you’ll see on Twitter is a message like this with a URL to the actual Flickr image:

Well that’s about all there is to it for now. You’ll notice some problems here and there. This is first pass code, but I think if you like experimenting with early versions of things, then feel free to give this a spin.

In a subsequent post I’ll go into some of the behind the scenes details and maybe list out some improvements I’ve made. Feel free to post your ideas here.

We’ll see how this experiment goes. Like Dave Winer points out with his Twittergrams, it should would be nice if Twitter supported other media that text. A graphic thumbnail with a link to an image would be perfect for InkGrams.

 Update: There appears to be a Firefox bug as well as a resize issue. I’ll track them down.