Twitter to Offer Its Own Photosharing Service

By Gilbert Falso :: 2:16 AM

If you want to share a photo on Twitter, you need to host it somewhere else first. The options are plentiful – Twitpic, yFrog, Flickr, Instagram, etc. – but the process to upload and link the photos from Twitter clients is not always seamless. Twitter hopes to change this by offering its own photosharing service, to be announced later this week.

Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo is set to make a statement regarding the service at AllThingsD’s D9 conference on Wednesday. The news was first broken on Monday afternoon by TechCrunch.

This is not a surprising turn of events, given statements earlier this year where Twitter told its developer network not to work on clients that mirrored the general features that Twitter already provided. Also, Twitter’s recent purchase of the TweetDeck platform shows that the company is trying to get a hold on, and standardize, the Twitter user experience. Bringing photosharing into the fold will only strengthen this position.

The one elephant in the room yet to be addressed, however, is the right of users to control how their images are used once they have been uploaded to the new service. The photosharing site TwitPic recently came under fire for changing their Terms of Service earlier this month, allowing sales of user images to third-parties.