Updated, at the foot of the post.
We’ve thought, for some time, that we’d see this. Today it’s finally here. Twitter has just rolled out a new setting that you’ll see as “Show photos and videos from everyone”. What this means, clearly, is that Twitter is now going to start embedding photos and videos from users in your stream.
According to the description:
“By default, you’ll only see images and videos shared by people you’re following, and reveal those by people you’re not. Check this box to see media from everyone on Twitter.”
While we here at TNW aren’t seeing the items in our streams yet, it’s obvious what Twitter is headed for. The question that comes to mind, immediately, is what will happen to services such as TwitPic and TwitVid?
It’s not clear, yet, if Twitter will be offering its own upload service or if the site will pull from the API of the already-existing ones.
We’ve pinged Twitter for more details, and will let you know when we find out more.
Update, from Twitter:
We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps.
Via Mashable
Twitter might just embed the Twitpic etc. or it could give the possibility to upload content to Twitter itself. Either way services like Twitpic will lose on it since they need eyeballs at their site hosting the content next to the ad.
I think it’s a great move from Twitter and hope that if they are going to host the content themselves it won’t aid in extra free fail whales :-|
Boy i hope its as reliably working as twitter.com itself!
I suspect that this will the first push of twitter annotations into the wild. In which case TwitPic et al would be hosting the the media and will need to add the annotations to any tweets that they create.
Already noticed that Twitter replies now have links to the original. Can’t wait ’til they implement pages with full conversations a la status.net and jaiku.
Perhaps the legacy status platform finally wants to catch up with features already in the open source status platforms like embedding photos and images via oembed.
Though I’m sure twitter would never be bold enough to implement the full ostatus distributed peering to allow the conversation to grow beyond the walled garden to include everyone from status.net and buddycloud to folks w/ the proper wordpress plug-ins.
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