14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has rolled out its photo sharing feature, which it unveiled a couple of months ago. Twitter has confirmed that all users can now attach images to their tweets directly. The feature is only available on the main, desktop site, but it's coming to the Twitter mobile apps soon.
"All users can now easily share photos on Twitter.com. Add an image to your Tweet using the camera icon," Twitter confirmed in a tweet.
All users should be noticing a small camera icon when they write a new tweet. Clicking on it will enable them to pick a photo from their computers to post along with the tweet.
The image will show up as a link in the tweet text, but will be displayed in the right side panel on Twitter.com.
The site already displays images from other photo-sharing and hosting services, but it has now started hosting the images itself.
Twitter has been moving to integrate more features into the core service, things that used to be covered by third parties.
It's not moving too aggressively with the photo sharing feature, at least for now, but it is a threat to established services, like Twitpic.
Twitter is relying on Photobucket to provide the actual hosting, but photos uploaded to the site will reside under a pic.twitter.com URL.
This is just the start though, Twitter has bigger plans for photos on the site. It plans to launch a Galleries feature, which will feature the photos uploaded by each user.
It will also integrate photo sharing into its mobile apps, effectively becoming a competitor in the hotly disputed mobile photo sharing market.
Twitter also managed to work with Apple and build integration at the OS level in the upcoming iOS 5. Users will be able to tweet from the camera app, for example, and the image will be attached and posted automatically.