Twitter just shot Twitpic and Yfrog in the heart. The social networking company today announced that it would soon roll out a feature allowing users to upload pictures and share videos using native Twitter tools. The photos will actually be hosted by Photobucket, but there will be tight integratio with Twitter, allowing you to do things like see the latest photos associated with a #hashtag in Twitter search.
Users will retain the rights to all photos, but now instead of limiting your messages to 140 characters, you’ll soon be able to include an image using Twitter’s service rather than a third party service.
Of course, if Twitter had offered this capability right off the bat, Twitpic and other third party sharing services probably never would have gotten off the ground. Now that there’s a whole industry filled with companies trying to flesh out Twitter’s services, you kind of have to wonder if every single one of them is playing dice with Twitter, just betting that the company won’t decide to roll out a native feature that makes the third party service obsolete.
On the other hand, maybe people are so accustomed to using Twitpic and similar services that they won’t feel the urge to switch to Twitter’s native picture sharing even when it becomes available.
