Instead of buying a photo sharing service like Flickr, TwitPic or even yFrog, Twitter is allegedly building one in secret from scratch.
According to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge on announcing it’s own built in Twitpic competitor. Like tomorrow, if things go according to plan (naturally this post might change that). (TechCrunch)
Previously the only thing images Twitter hosted on their servers were user profiles pictures, although aside from that the company has dogmatically embraced a “text only” strategy.
Although supporting text made it easy for Twitter to maintain uptime (especially when dealing with the fail whales of yesteryear), Twitter needs to add media if it wants to remain competitive against rivals like Tumblr (who honestly is Twitter’s biggest threat right now).
Embracing photos could help Twitter improve it’s retention of new comers, as well as give users a reason to dwell within the tweet stream a little longer instead by viewing images from their friends.
If Twitter unveils photo sharing in the near future, it may not be long until we see the social network embrace video hosting as well (perhaps for “quick shots” similar to what 12seconds did).
It’s still unclear whether this will be a free feature or a premium one, although if Twitter did offer it as a premium (or even fremium) service, would you be willing to pay for it?
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I do not like this at all. Seems Twitter is just moving 3rd party devs out of the way to do their own version of another function. I think it eliminates choice in the long run which is never a good thing.
If this causes Twitpic to drop off and out of service I will be lookign to self host photos I tweet.