From the Twitter blog:
Millions of people share photos on Twitter every day. We’re going to make that easier than ever. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com. And of course, you’ll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps. A special thanks to our partner Photobucket for hosting these photos behind the scenes.
The writing has been on the wall for quite some time now. Today, Twitter has officially announced their own image service, powered by Photobucket. This takes the “don’t waste your time developing your own 3rd party clients” one step further. The next targets obviously are TwitPic, yfrog, etc. Here are some screenshots of the new service.
Dick Costolo and Walt Mossberg during D9:
11:02 am: Walt: So photo stays with the Tweet, right?
11:02 am: Costolo. Yes, it’s part of the metadata.
From a technology standpoint it looks like the images will be part of the metadata or annotations of a tweet. This way it probably won’t take away any of your 140 characters, just like geolocation data. Annotations have been part of announced by Twitter for quite some time now.
Update: Not annotations but entities:
[blackbirdpie id=”76040542873591808″]
[flattr uid=’holgere’ btn=’compact’ /]