14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter finally introduced its own photo sharing and hosting service this summer. Technically, it's not Twitter's photo hosting service, but it is integrated with the site and the apps and is the official tool.
As you can imagine, the integrated option hurt third-party providers quite a lot. You may even expect it to be the number one photo host at this point.
What you may not expect is that photo sharing on Twitter has exploded since the official service debuted, there were four times as many photos shared in tweets at the end of 2011 than they were at the start of the year.
But that's what Topsy, the social search engine, found out when looking at the data that flows through it. It determined that the number of photos shared grew 421 percent over the course of 2011.
In total, 58.4 million photos were shared over Twitter in December. Twitter itself accounted for 65 percent of those.
The interesting part though is that the growth actually happened in the last few months of the year, starting in September when the integrated Twitter photo hosting option rolled out to users.
Until then, photo sharing only saw a very modest growth. Twitter's integrated photo hosting was certainly disruptive on the ecosystem of third-party services that developed to fill the need.
However, some services were hit harder than others and some actually grew, quite significantly, during this time. Yfrog took the biggest hit, the number of photos hosted on it halved since September. Twitpic also saw a drop in usage, but a smaller one.
However, in that same time, Instagram grew with more photos coming from the iPhone photo sharing app in December than in September. Even more impressive is Lockerz's (formerly Plixi) growth. Usage grew several times in the same months for Lockerz.