Is A Picture Worth 140 Characters?

<Cross posted from our ImpactWatch Blog>

Editors Note: Hannah installed the Firefox plugin Power Twitter in order to get photos and videos to appear in her Twitter stream.  For those of you that want to see what it looks like, see this screengrab.

Yesterday I was walking through Mexico City and I snapped a photo of a tanning salon. I thought that, coupled with a witty comment, it would make a great tweet. Selling sun to tan people in one of the world’s sunniest cities seems like a pretty funny business to be running in a global recession.

But I haven’t posted it.

I haven’t fully embraced the new ability to embed photos in Twitter. They distract me. I feel like they are encroaching on other tweets’ personal space. And I’m assuming other users are noticing this too – making the addition of a video or photo a new tactic for making your tweet stand out from the rest.

So I have to get used to videos and photos in my Twitterstream and probably lots of them: photos of your cat, your recorded marketing pitch, any even-slightly-humorous video you find on YouTube.

I’ve made my peace with that. But would it be too much to ask for Twitter to add them a little more discreetly? How about a thumbnail with mouse-over to enlarge? Or as @pugofwar suggested on twitter this morning, a Lightbox* image on clicking.

What do you think of the new “Post Photo” feature? Are you using it? Are you loving it? Do you long for the days of links and Twitpic?

Check out Hannah’s photo-free profile on Twitter.

*That’s the script that makes images appear “over” the web page, then you click to close them.