Users can now share posted content on their Twitter accounts using a simple web-based sharing button or via email/mobile using a unique "2Twitter" email address. Although all uploaded content is tweetable, new content uploaded via the web is not auto-tweeted. Mobile uploads are only sent to Twitter if the user's 2Twitter email address is used.

Once a Twitter account is added to a Flickr user's account as a blog, the "Blog This" function will allow that user to tweet about any image with a short URL and a 116 character limit. The title of the image is automatically included in the tweet. The "Blog This" icon is located on the Flickr photo page and doesn't appear in a user's photo stream.

Here's what the function and resultant tweet looks liked when I posted a photo from my own account:

And here's a tweet I sent about an image and design from another user, ThisIsStar.

Sadly, the resultant tweet doesn't indicate that the image is from another user; we can see this causing some confusion, especially when users are in a hurry. Hopefully, the generator of the tweet will edit the included text to reflect ownership accurately, e.g., "Check out this awesome design from @thisisstar."

So, what will this mean for other services designed to post images to Twitter? While the new Twitter-posting capabilities at Flickr are exciting, they do present a few conflicts and redundancies. If Flickr wanted to kill other image-tweeting services, they should have allowed users to choose to auto-tweet about new batches of photos without having to select each pic individually after the fact. As it stands, only Flickr's mobile upload function truly replaces services such as Twitpic and yFrog.

With regard to services such as FriendFeed or PixelPipe that have been shuffling links to our newly posted Flickr photos over to our Twitter accounts automatically, the new Flickr function doesn't really help consolidate users' efforts or save their time. Auto-tweets from third-party aggregators such as these are still the only way to tweet new images from the web without taking extra steps.

However, the redundancy issue will rear its ugly head for mobile uploads to the 2Twitter addresses. For example, if I uploaded from my device right now using a 2Twitter address, it would post to Flickr and Twitter first. Then a FriendFeed post would be generated automatically. That FriendFeed note would then get pushed to Twitter. This is clearly too much noise, but Flickr doesn't give me the necessary incentive to completely turn off FriendFeed's Flickr integration.

Although these issues mean, from our point of view, that the feature still needs improvement, it's a great way to share already uploaded content from a wide range of sources.