When Twitterrific was released on the App Store for iPhone, I was excited that photo upload client TwitPic was included for easy mobile photo sharing. One thing I quickly noticed, however, was that everything worked great, but any photo I snapped from within Twitterrific would not make its way into my iPhone’s Camera Roll.

This was a problem for me personally because I use Radar almost exclusively for mobile photos, which is connected to my Facebook account as an application. In order to get photos to my Radar, I send mobile photos to a specially generated email address @radar.net. Since Twitterrific/TwitPic didn’t give me access to photos I would snap while out on the road, I had to find another solution to share pictures.

Another criticism of Twitterrific for iPhone was the lack of choice with the photo upload client. Austin’s own Damon Clinkscales has made his own version of TwitPic that I find to be superior since it’s linked to my Flickr (which I hardly used before) with a simple autotag. If you haven’t used SnapTweet, you really should check it out (not to mention Damon’s other Twitter app, DoesFollow, a stalker, ahem, I mean, power user’s dream).

How on earth am I to fix this 2.0 problem-o?!

I sat and pondered this for a while then quickly fired up Google Apps for Domains to see if it was the answer to my problems. Google Apps will let you create a mailing list in the Email section of the Service Settings (under the Email addresses tab). I created one of these and listed the addresses used by Radar, BrightKite, Facebook (mobile@facebook.com) and Flickr (and by extension, SnapTweet and Twitter) to upload mobile photos (I suggest giving the mailing list a short email address, for the sake of speed).

Every service I added worked, save BrightKite (I think only because I wasn’t checked in to any place) and Radar for no particular reason (damn). Since Radar was really a way to get things indirectly to Facebook, I have let things be for now since they post via mobile@facebook.com, but I will try and figure out why this doesn’t work (I have some leads and am looking into them). Anyone from the Radar team reading this?

Try it out for yourself! Is this a good solution for you or do you prefer to upload within iPhone apps? So many picture services, so little time.

Editor’s note: This post would have been completely unnecessary if data portability was absolutely possible. Austin: Live Music and Semantic Web Capitals of the World, coming soon to a theater near you.