Twitter Unveils Photo & Video Sharing
 

by Chris Taylor62

After years of leaving photos and videos to third-party services likeTwitpic and Yfrog, Twitter has finally launched its own version.

“A native photosharing experience will be rolled out to 100% of users over the next couple of weeks,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the D9 Conference.

The service means that photos and videos will be directly connected to tweets. They will be viewable on Twitter.com without having to leave the site. Twitter will also “surface the most popular videos and tweets” in a new section of the homepage, Costolo said.

Users who access mobile versions of Twitter will be able to add photos and videos from their apps soon, according to the official Twitter blog post by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey.

Twitter’s technology partner in the new service: Photobucket. Photos on Twitter will bear the tag “powered by Photobucket,” which will link to a page that allows users to further edit, share or save their photos on Photobucket.

One big question we had about the long-rumored service — would Twitter own the copyright on those snaps? Costolo’s answer was unambiguous. “Users will own the rights to their photos on Twitter,” he said. Twitpic has suffered in the past from ambiguity over its copyright rules.

Here’s Twitter’s official video introduction to the new sharing service.