Twitter to release new features – photo and video sharing

A news report quotes Twitter CEO Dick Costolo “A native photo sharing experience will be rolled out to 100% users over the next couple of weeks”.

This entails into user not having to leave the Twitter website to view pictures or videos. For app developers, they do not have to worry about integrating the images/videos in their app to some third party service to show them on Twitter timelines.

Twitter has partnered with Photobucket to bring this service on board. Photos and videos posted by users would be wearing a badge ‘Powered by Photobucket’.

This news also rebounds that Twitter would float most popular videos and images in a dedicated section on their website. With the wild guesses on, it means the API from Twitter could be made available that provides all the Latest/Top Tweeted/Most Re-tweeted/Most Favorite pictures and videos.

What all of these means to different stakeholders?

Developers could see this as an opportunity of topping up their apps with host of new features…

Rich and substance-full content browsing for users with the help of top viewed pictures/videos/tweets…

For mobile users, I think the experience would pretty much be the same. Its just that instead of a link now they might see a thumbnail of the content. Its all same after tapping that thumbnail…a full screen display of the media content.

Some questions…

What it means for services like Twit-pic, Y frog, Lockers etc who provides these libraries to developers…Are they somewhat out of business?

If the images are tagged with “Powered by Photobucket” badge, who owns the copyright to the image? Twitter, Photobucket….User?

Would Twitter provide a separate sharing link to images or videos posted OR users just can do away with the link to that Tweet?

Should existing apps change their service and switch to the default ones…soon to be released by Twitter?

Please do share your bit in the comments section on what you think about this new service. What could be some new interesting cool features to top up the host twitter apps?

Please share…

BTW:

Link to Twitter’s blog post