Twitter is going beyond 140 characters by adding a photo-sharing service. The social network is rolling out an image-hosting feature to users over the next couple of weeks, CEO Dick Costolo announced Wednesday at
the All Things Digital conference here.Users will be able to upload photos through Twitter's website to start, with desktop and mobile applications coming later, Costolo said.
To construct the service's backbone, Twitter partnered with Photobucket, which already hosts more than 8 billion photos and videos. The Twitter service will accept only still images.
"Photobucket is excited to be chosen to power this extension of Twitter," Photobucket CEO Tom Munro said in an e-mailed statement. "We are confident that together we can seamlessly provide a simple, intuitive photo sharing experience for Twitter users"
Twitter is also in talks with cellular carriers to enable people to tweet photos using a phone's picture-messaging system, Twitter said in a statement.
The new photo feature coincides with changes to Twitter's search function. Results pages will now include popular photos and videos alongside text. The videos will be pulled from websites such as YouTube and Vimeo.
Several third-party photo services, such as Twitpic and Yfrog, have specifically targeted Twitter users. Costolo said Twitter created its own service to make the process easier for less tech-savvy people.
"We just need to remove the friction from adding photos into Twitter," he said.
But Twitter's recent moves to compete with the companies that build products for its service has created some ill will. Developers say they feel uneasy about Twitter acquiring makers of related software, such as TweetDeck, and then threatening to change the rules so as to potentially lock out certain types of apps.
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