140 characters, 1,000 words
The rumours were true; Twitter is indeed launching its own photo hosting service.
In a partnership with Photobucket, which will be doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, Twitter will start enabling users to share photos from their tweets directly from Twitter.com, negating the requirement to use a third party hosting service.
The proprietary photo hosting will be accessible both from the Twitter website and from Twitter's official mobile applications. Additionally, Twitter says it is working with mobile carriers globally to make it possible to send images via MMS, adding to the current ability to post a Twitter update via text message (the origin of the 140 character limit, incidentally).
In addition to bringing an in-house image hosting solution to in the coming weeks, starting from today, Twitter is pushing out an updated search. Primarily the new search should offer more relevant results but it will also start offering more information than before, with related photos and videos showing up alongside tweets and related topics.
Firefox users can get a new version of Firefox with Twitter, enabling Twitter search direct from the Awesome Bar. Searches for hastags and usernames, prefixed with the # or @ symbols, are supported, cutting down the time it takes to find Twitter results when you're looking for them.
