Twitter have finally bitten the bullet and started their own first party service to rival services like Twitpic and Yfrog. The native photo sharing experience, as Twitter are referring to it, will utterly demolish the userbase among third party services, most likely. Twitter said that ‘[The] experience will be rolled out to 100% of users over the next couple of weeks. [The service will also] surface the most popular videos and tweets.’ The ‘surfacing’ of popular videos and tweets will be directly connected to the Twitter homepage.
While the official mobile version of Twitter currently uses Twitpic in order to allow users to send photos in from their phones and attach them to tweets, updates will soon mean that photos and videos will be done via the first party service directly from the mobile application. Photobucket are Twitter’s ‘technology partner’ in the new service.
And interestingly and importantly, considering Facebook’s ownership of users photographs and videos, is the fact that Twitter will preserve the user’s rights to all photographs and uploaded videos. Which is quite good, isn’t it?
While this is all superb news and a jolly good chance for everyone using Twitter to pat themselves on the back, some may take a look at the increasing media services provided by first-party extensions and consider these against the ethos of what the site is designed to do. Regardless, users want to share photos and videos (and often do via URL shorteners born from Twitter) and Twitter isn’t one to be behind the times, as its short history has shown.
