JigTweets – New Twitter Tool to Send Just about Anything as a Tweet

JigTweets is a new little tool launching today that allows a Twitter user to update his or her Twitter feed with just about anything - be it a picture, a URL, an RSS feed, a location or a YouTube video.

To start using the service you will need to go to its website where you will see your regular Twitter home page with updates from your friends. There will also be an additional toolbar above the standard page - this toolbar is what you will need to use to update with additional content instead of the text-only tweets we are accustomed to.

The application works pretty simple. For example, to send a picture as an update you will need to click the appropriate link, choose the picture from your computer, add an optional description and send it. JigTweets will generate a special URL for you that you will be able to update your Twitter feed with directly from the application (and add any comments you want to as well). Here is what an update via JigTweets will look like:

To me the most interesting functionality is updating your feed with a location. Of course it is not as automated as Brightkite is but JigTweets allows you to tweet any location you want to your followers and not only where you are at the moment - for example, you may want to point to a place where some meetup will take place right on a map. To do that you choose the location on Google Maps, add your comments and update your feed. Your followers clicking the link generated by JigTweets will see the location on a map along with the comments you added.

I can see JigTweets used for things like sharing your experience from the last vacation with your followers right on Twitter when your blog is not the right place to do that (or when you don’t have a blog at all which is also still a possibility in this world). First you publish the place you visited, next you send a few photos along with your comments and then maybe a video you shot there (after uploading it to YouTube first). To me this sounds like an interesting new way to interact with your Twitter followers and get some extra content posted to your Twitter feed.

Besides, there is also an interesting approach to posting an RSS feed to Twitter offered by JigTweets. Basically it offers a small piece of code for bloggers to generate a small button to use anywhere on their blogs to suggest their readers to automatically post all the new posts from this blog for their own Twitter followers to see (if these readers are invariably enthusiastic about the content of the blog). And while I don’t see many readers to be actually generous enough to clutter their own updates with posts from their favorite bloggers, it can also be an alternative to TwitterFeed service to update your Twitter statuses with your own posts or any content that you can deliver via RSS. Here is how this button looks for Profy feed (remember,  this will be sending all our posts here to your Twitter account - but there is an additional confirmation step needed so you may click it just to see how it works, I certainly do not expect you to help us get attention to our posts here):

There is also a similar functionality to post just about any URL to Twitter using JigTweets so you can let your visitors help you spread the word about your website by placing a button to send it to Twitter as well.

All in all, I think JigTweets is a nice interesting tool to play with and keep in mind for when you need to post a place or a video to your Twitter feed. Of course the service will not provide the visual appeal that you will find on FriendFeed for the same tasks like posting a photo or a video as for your followers to see exactly what you posted they will need to click the JigTweets URL first to be taken to a new tab with the intended content. But still the idea seems to be a good one to me and with some additional work on it this could get some additional interface tweaks that will make it more usable. And I am sure that there are people who will be glad to have an opportunity to make their tweets less text-focused.