As you might have heard, Twitter launched their own photo sharing service in August, which is hosted by Photobucket. Since then Twitter has obvious seen a huge rise in their photo sharing service and the third party Twitter photo clients that were dominating the market are starting to die.
Market share of all the major third party Twitter photo sharing services have dropped, Twitpic, Yfrog and more. It simply now seems that these services are finding it very hard to diversify and innovate within the space. These services really need to change their model or core service or they are going to fade into obscurity very quickly.
I’m more of a Twitpic man myself. All my Twitpic pictures are of random things I saw such as a cool old train on Sunday or a weird seal chilling in a harbour. The URL which links to my pictures is of course a Twitpic one. But now, what about the millions of other people who upload photos or send links via YouTube to their Twitter. Because twitter allows a maximum of 140 characters per tweet you must make everything count.
Now, Bitly (or bit.ly as you may see it in tweets) is teaming up with Yfrog to provide an image uploading service on twitter. Bitly were given their first big break when their URL was officially built into twitter, replacing the well-known TinyURL. The new image service which will allow users to upload images via the Bitly website and automatically sync it with their twitter is due to be live by the end of the month.
Bitly is certainly getting big now with other companies such as Google (Google Reader) and Typepad now using the shortened URLs as standard. CBS is also using the service on its website.
So, from now on expect to see a lot more Bitly URLs on Twitter.
