Okay, so you’re one of the cool kids that got yourself the spiffy new iPhone 3G S, and you probably really want to take advantage of its best new feature — video. Sure the new phone gives you a quick post to YouTube option, but did you know there’s already a few great ways that you can post your videos directly to Twitter?
We’ll show you how to quickly get your video creations from your iPhone to Twitter (
). We’ll also help you understand some of the dos and don’ts for each particular option, to make sure that your newly tweeted videos show up just as you envisioned them. Happy video recording and tweeting!
1. Use YouTube to Post to Twitter
Earlier this month we half-jokingly noted that YouTube is now the TwitPic of video. Why? Well, they finally enabled a long sought after feature: auto-posting of videos to Twitter. Given that the new iPhone now lets you post your videos straight to YouTube from the camera app, you can combine these two great new things and push your videos from your phone to Twitter in no time at all.
Here’s how: Before you share video with YouTube (
), make sure you update your autoshare settings for the site. All you need to do is connect the services you want to integrate with YouTube. In this case, it will be Twitter, but you also might want to make the connection between YouTube and Facebook () and/or Google Reader () as well. Once you’ve made the connection, you can forget about manually sharing your YouTube videos with Twitter ever again.
Now every time you record a video, just tap to post it to YouTube from your phone’s camera app, add a title, description, category, and a few tags, and hit publish. Once your video is uploaded, a tweet will be auto-generated and posted to Twitter on your behalf.
The great thing about this method for tweeting iPhone 3G S videos is that you don’t have to worry about shooting your video in widescreen/landscape or standard mode. You can film horizontally, vertically, and for longer periods of time, and YouTube will still format the video appropriately.
2. Email Your Videos to Twitter
The simplest method is just to email your videos to Twitter. The ever-evolving email-to-blog platform, Posterous () (now with blog import), has created a dead simple way to get your iPhone 3GS videos from your phone to Twitter via email.
As you would with any other content you want to post to Posterous, simply email the video to post@posterous.com. If you’ve already configured your Twitter auto-posting settings for Posterous, which you can do here, then your video will post to Posterous and automatically tweet out a link.
The Posterous advantage is that if you have cross-posting enabled for a ton of other sites — they do support quite a few — and you just want to share your video with Twitter, you can use the twitter@posterous.com email address. Also pretty nifty is that the subject line of your email becomes the title, the email body becomes the video post description, and tags can be added using the syntax ((tag: video, iphone)) in the subject line.
Posterous is perfect for recording video in widescreen/landscape mode or standard mode, and it will format your video accordingly. The only downside is that videos will need to be short in length, as any videos longer than a minute cannot be sent via email.
3. Get a Video-Friendly App
Although the deluge of video recording and posting Twitter apps has yet to happen, there are a few worthwhile apps that are already supporting posting iPhone 3G S videos to Twitter.
The unreleased TweetReel really is the TwitPic () for video, but it’s only available as an iPhone app (coming soon). This nifty app lets you shoot videos (and photos), or grab them from your library, add your Twitter text, and post it to the web. Videos are posted to your TweetReel site (tweetreel.com/twittername), and immediately shared with Twitter.
If you’re looking for something already on the market, check out Twittelator Pro 3.0 [iTunes Link]. The updated app, which costs $4.99, includes a video recording and sharing option that lets you attach videos to tweets, and upload them to the photo and video sharing site yFrog. Just remember to shoot your videos in widescreen mode if you want them to render correctly (ie. not post sideways). We’d also advise you to record videos from the camera app instead, as videos recorded in Twittelator Pro aren’t saved to your library and might disappear should you choose to tweet without a WiFi connection.
Another possibility for mobile video fans is Kyte’s updated premium iPhone app [iTunes link]. The app also comes with a $4.99 price tag and supports video record and upload, with videos uploading to your Kyte channel. To tweet your video uploads from the app, just add your Twitter login credentials to your Kyte integration settings.