Yesterday TechCrunch reported that Twitter is about to launch their own photo sharing service for the social media company.
Let’s see – how many ways can I not like this idea.
Here is just another example of the social media giant taking out third party developers in order to add the service to their own infrastructure. How easy would it be at that point for Twitter to block folks like TwitPic, Yfrogs and other picture posting services from their API and force users to use whatever their offering is?
I hope it does not come to that. End users need to continue to be able to make choices when it comes to these third party services and their own personal preferences. A world of no choice is not OK.
And yes part of this irritates me because I have a lot of photos and time invested in TwitPic which I have used since they first emerged into the fledgling Twitter photo sharing scene. In fact, I helped test some of the earliest versions of TwitPic in those days.
If this happens and Twitter muscles out the little guys then I guess I will be in the market for the ability to self host pictures I post to Twitter just like I did for URL shortening a few months ago.
