Image via Wikipedia
The problem with top level services, like Twitter who essentially outsource their bells and whistles to application developers, is that when they decide to take one of those bells or whistles and take them in-house they essentially put a number of smaller, innovative, start-ups out of business.
We’ve seen this happen recently when Twitter bought the 3rd party TweetDeck application. Twitter having their own desktop application will stunt the growth and general usage of third party applications.
The same is happening with image sharing on Twitter. Twitter recently announced that they will be rolling out their own way of sharing photos.
Evidently Twitter is trying to keep their users at ‘home’ by keeping them on their site and on their software.
Is it a good idea though? With such an expansive user base, can you make a user interface that will appeal to every user? Is the variety of third party services what Twitter has excelled?
What will twitter’s very own photo sharing mean to other already popular services like instagram, yfrog, twitpic? there’s no telling yet but its sure to take a chunk out of their share of the image sharing pie.
Just how do Twitter users share their images though?
Sysomos recently carried out a survey on Twitter to see how users post pics and came up with some interesting results.
On May 30th of 2011 , of all the tweets posted that day… (about 170 million tweets)
- 14.9% contained a link
- 1.25% contained a link to a photo (via a pic sharing service) (2.125 million)
That’s a whole lot of pictures!
Which image hosting services took care of those 2.125 million pictures?
Will you continue to use your favorite image hosting service/s or will you opt for Twitter’s native service when it pops up?
Related articles
- Who’s got the most to lose from Twitter’s new image sharing service? (thenextweb.com)
- Twitter adding a photo-sharing feature (cnn.com)
- Twitter Rolls Out Improved Search Functionality With Photos & Videos (hubspot.com)
