Twitter was originally a text-only messaging service but this didn’t stop users from utilizing third-party services to share photos. Twitpic, Instagram and yFrog are just a few examples of such services whose future is now uncertain. In an attempt to control the revenue stream and ensure a more streamlined, consistent experience for users, Twitter is also putting the “smack-down” on third-party client for photo-sharing services. The company has already acquired Tweetie and re-released it as the official Twitter client on OS X. Recently, it was announced that Twitter had acquired Tweet Deck.

His goal in acquiring these programs, says Costolo, is to encourage app developers to “move up on the value chain.” Citing an app the Red Cross is utilizing along with the app Klout as examples of his point, he talked about adding value to the Twitter ecosystem.

Costolo is the current CEO of Twitter, following Evan Williams, who stepped down as CEO last year after almost exactly 2 years in that position.
Not only is Twitter launching its own photo-sharing service; it’s also improving the search engine it employs. The goal is to have results become more personalized making search queries come back with different content depending on who the user is and which people are on their personal network. Twitter plans to have videos and photos come back on the results page, as well.

The company behind the scene, so to speak, is Photobucket which delivers the storage and infrastructure to host these photos. The new photo service is currently rolled out, users can expect it to become available in the coming weeks.

Twitter, developed in March of ’06 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year, has gained popularity in leaps and bounds since its launch. In July of 2007 it had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter. In only a year, this number grew to 100 million posts per quarter and now, with an estimated user base of over 200 million people worldwide, users of Twitter purportedly issue around a billion tweets every six days. The company reports 13 billion API requests coming in every single day. Despite being censored in Iran, China, Egypt and South Korea, Twitter continues to see rapid growth and it is generally felt that this is due to the company’s commitment to keeping up with their user base and constantly striving to improve the service and its relevance to the user community.

A click on a preview thumbnail will open a preview window containing additional information like size, title or format of the selected image. Size buttons on the bottom will load the image in different sizes. These size buttons are automatically adjusted depending on the original size of the image. The same toolbar contains buttons to save the image to the local computer, view it in the original context (which will open the image in the default web browser), set it as the desktop background, copy or share it.

Ginipic is an excellent image search engine that can be used to search for images on multiple image search engines including some of the best places to download wallpapers like Deviant Art or Flickr. The application is a bit heavy on the resource usage but since it does not have to be running all the time in the background it does not matter that much.

The Firefox add-on adds an option to upload any image to a Photobucket account to the Firefox right-click menu. The process is effective and simple. The user needs to be logged in or log into Photobucket during the first upload. This is not necessary again as long as is logged into the site which usually means per session or even longer.

A right-click on any image will display Upload to Photobucket entry which can be used to send the image right to the Photobucket account. The user will be notified if the upload was successful by an overlay bar on top of the page. This bar displays two additional buttons which can be used to view the uploaded image or to open the Photobucket album organizer.

The Photobucket Upload add-on can be downloaded on the Mozilla homepage.

Albelli Photobucket is one of those services on the Internet where photo books can be created. Unlike several other services on the Internet it provides an Adobe Air application which comes with an advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is the fact that the application is run on the user’s computer which means that there is no delay when choosing photos from the hard drive of the user. Photos can also be imported from Photobucket, Flickr and two other image hosters.

The disadvantage is Adobe Air. Well not really an disadvantage but Adobe Air has to be installed before the Albelli Photobucket application can be used. It’s not a complicated process though and everything runs fluent when both applications have been installed.

The process in the application is always the same. The user chooses a product that he wants to create. Products are different sized photo books that vary not only in sizes but also in the amount of pages.

The second step is optional. A theme can be selected. Currently five different occasions each with several themes can be selected. Some examples would be themes for weddings, vacations or a baby.

The photos can be uploaded in the next step. Supported are photos from the hard drive and from four online image hosters. The four are Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa and SmugMug. Multiple photos can be imported at once. The application recommends to select additional photos if you have not selected enough to fill all pages with at least one photo.

Photos can be placed manually or automatically in the album. Between one and four photos can be placed on each page of the photo album. What I really liked was the creation process. Each page can be made with a different layout which means that you can place between one and four images on a page and add text to it as well. Each photo and the text can be placed freely on the page. Photos can even be rotated and resized if so desired. It is always possible to add more images and pages or remove some. I would probably leave some whitespace on the first page to write something manually on that page.

Prices start at $12.95 for a medium landscape photo book. Items are only shipped in the United States and there is no shipping and handling currently. To top this I have ten coupon codes that will reduce the price of a photo book by $12.95. That means you can create a free medium landscape photo book or reduce the price of a higher priced item by that amount.

Just write a comment to let me know that you want to have a photo book and let me know what you plan to do with it.

You need to create an account before you can start uploading photos. Only the United States can be picked as the country at the moment but there does not seem to be an IP check that prevents users from other countries to signup for an account. Once the account is verified the fun begins.

Adobe Photoshop Express has two main functions. The first is to function as a photo album and the second to edit the photos that you have uploaded. Each user gets 2 Gigabytes of storage space for his images which can be sorted into different albums. Images can be uploaded from the computer or imported from Facebook, Picasa or Photobucket.

Images can be shared with the outside world by dragging them into an album that is shared. Everyone can then access the images by loading the username.photoshop.com url of the user. The shared albums of other members of the website can be browsed as well.

I’m a bit disappointed about the image editing capabilities of Adobe Photoshop Express. Only 17 different tools are available to edit the image from rotation the image to changing the hue. This function of the website will be neglected by the majority of users in my opinion. Community features are missing, there is no way to comment on images for instance and no private messaging system.

This leaves us with another image hosting service with a slick interface, nothing more, nothing less.