The Daily Shoot Site Evolves

This last weekend, Mike Clark and I pushed a big revision to the Daily Shoot website. The core new feature of the website is that it aggregates and displays photographs that people Twitter in response to the daily assignments. It knows how to pull thumbnails from Flickr, The Best Camera, SnapTweet, TwitPic, TweetPhoto, yfrog, and imgur.

All a photographer needs to do to have their photographs included is post a tweet that mentions the @dailyshoot user, the assignment hashtag, and a link to a photo. For example, the following tweets resulted in the first five thumbnails in the screenshot above.

Note that you don't have to address a tweet directly to @dailyshoot. Just a mention, hashtag, and url anywhere in the tweet will do the trick. This makes it easier to submit assignments directly from applications like Best Camera.

Of course, now that we're grabbing the data directly from Twitter, we're taking things a few steps further. The site lets you browse photos by assignment or by photographer. While Mike and I were putting the finishing touches on this rev, I kept clicking around to see what different photographers had produced and was consistently amazed and proud. People are coming up with some really great photographs in response to the simple daily assignments that we're kicking out.

Finally, we've got a way for you to suggest assignments. We've also added an RSS feed to pull assignments, both current and past. We're hoping this last feature will find its way into some interesting places. For example, wouldn't it be cool if the iPhone camera application you used showed you today's Daily Shoot assignment? Now, it should be as simple as pie. (BTW, if you are interested in doing some integration, get in touch!)

Thanks to Patrick Lenz and Urban Hafner for some of the code that's running in the latest site. And many thanks to Mike who pulled everything together and made it all go. And lastly, thanks to Heroku for their platform. It's a joy to make webapps when the deployment process is so seamless and smooth.