Twitter Launches Photo Tagging (Get Ready)

Good/horrifying news: Soon, you'll be able to tag photos of people on Twitter.

They're also allowing you to add up to four photos per tweet and tag 10 people per photo, so you could conceivably embarrass 40 people in just 140 characters.

Talk about efficiency.

Tagging doesn't count toward a tweet's 140-limit character count, and you'll get notified if someone tags you in a tweet. The tagged photos will even display in embedded tweets.

"Tagging people in a picture makes conversations around photos fun and easy," Twitter said in its post announcing the update. And they're right. For instance, yesterday I had a friend anonymously send me a gift to my office based on a multi-person Twitter conversation. To figure out who sent it, I took a picture and Cc'd the people in the original tweet ... but having this feature on hand would've been much more convenient. The Cc's took up character count, I left someone off the tweet because of it, and it would've been nice to take another picture or two.

But that's obviously not the only use case.

So long, and thanks for all the discretion.

Where this goes from good to horrifying is when you think about the feature being used like photo tagging on Facebook. In my friend circle, the generally accepted etiquette is don't tag photos. People are friends with their coworkers, bosses, clients, customers, that wench Nancy from high school who always thought she was better than you. No one needs to see your half open mouth at a late-night taco stand check-in sporting a very small but very real sprig of cilantro.

When you take that scenario and apply it to public content like Twitter, I can see people getting a little twitchy.

But there's recourse. You can adjust your settings here to control who can tag you, and how you get notified. They have detailed help documentation, as well, to walk you through the process.

If you're not one of the twitchy ones, get excited -- you might already have photo tagging enabled on your iPhone (Twitter started rolling it out yesterday to iPhone users with the updated app). Android and desktop users should see the functionality soon as well -- though Twitter didn't specify a release date.

Twitter Launches Photo Tagging (Get Ready)