Twitter has begun rolling out an image uploading service after announcing the feature at the D9 Conference in San Francisco in June.

Users will now be able to upload photos directly from Twitter, rather than using third-party services.

Just as tweets are restricted to 140 characters, the photos will be limited to 3MB.

Depending on the size of the photo, it will take up a chunk of a user's 140-character tweet and, once posted, will be scaled to fit the display pane on the right of the Twitter timeline.

The big question is whether this new service will spell the end for TwitPic, which has run a photo-sharing service for Twitter users since 2008, and turned down a $10m acquisition offer two years ago.

Twitter's photo sharing service is pretty easy to use. Underneath the message box, users will see a camera icon, next to the compass icon, where they can upload photos from the device they are using.

A thumbnail of the image will appear in the lower left corner of the message box, and the character count will decrease according to the picture's size.

Twitter said that it will add a media gallery function in the coming weeks to show images that have been shared from Twitter's new image upload service or from third-party photo sharing services.

10 Aug 2011