According to Twitter PR representative Carolyn Penner, Twitter has started rolling out its new photo feature to a small subset of users outside of employees. The feature was live for employees as of last week, but it is hitting the rest of Twitter users starting this week. Our own @Alexia is one of the lucky users to get the service first.
As we reported last week, the new feature allows users to upload photos, which show up in your actually Tweets and timeline. Because some users now has the service, we now know more details on how it works. For example, the camera feature is located next to “add your location” in the Tweet UI (see screenshot below) and from there you’ll be able to upload a photo as you Tweet on Twitter.com and eventually via mobile clients.
For now, the service doesn’t seem to work on mobile clients, and defaults to yFrog’s photo sharing service.
Twitter is partnering with Photobucket to host these photos but you don’t need a Photobucket account to use it. And photos are only visible on Twitter, and not on Photobucket’s image sharing site. Beneath every photo is a “powered by Photobucket” note.
And if you click on a photo in a user’s stream who you are not following, Twitter will show you this message, “This Tweet is from someone you’re not following. The media they’re mentioning could be anything, even something you might find offensive” with an option to display the photo. You can also choose to always display photos from users who you are not following or following. You can also turn off auto-display in Settings as well.
Twitter just announced a pretty in-depth integration with Apple’s iOS 5, which also leverages the new photo service. Here’s what the iOS/Twitter integration looks like.
