Twitter releases photo-sharing service powered by Photobucket

August 10, 2011 - 13:44 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Twitter has confirmed that its photo-sharing and uploading service is now available to all users.

Users will now find a camera icon on the bottom of the “What’s Happening?” box on Twitter.com. Clicking it will let users select a picture to upload, which they can then preview before sending it to the world. Tweets containing photos include a link to pic.twitter.com, along with a thumbnail of the attached picture.

Twitter’s photo-sharing service is powered by Photobucket, which provides all of the hosting for user-uploaded photos.

Twitter isn’t saying when mobile photo uploads will be available in its Android and iOS apps, but these are expected to be coming very soon.

Twitter’s photo service essentially negates the usefulness of photo-sharing services like TwitPic. Twitter has come under criticism for competing with third-party services built on its platform. Developers don’t know whether Twitter will suddenly start competing with their products, an issue that has created a cloud of uncertainty over the Twitter ecosystem, Mashable reported.

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets". Twitter was created in March 2006.