New York — Your 140-character communication is poised get a whole lot more visual. Microblogging outfit Twitter has now officially announced that it is unleashing both its own photo-sharing service as well as a completely revamped version of search, CEO Dick Costolo announced on Wednesday at the D9 conference.
Moving forward, during the next several weeks, Twitter will be rolling out a new way of searching to provide its users with more relevant tweets, photos and videos on the results page when someone searches for something or clicks on a trending topic.
Through a partnership with Photobucket, Twitter also will unfurl a way to upload a photo and attach it to their tweets, including an easier way to sift through the millions of shared photos posted on the site each day directly from Twitter’s site or mobile apps.
This will eventually be available through the site’s official mobile apps, Twitter wrote on its blog. Photobucket will host the photos, and Twitter will continue to allow users to use third-party services, such as Twitpic and Yfrog.
Twitter on its blog, mentioned that the functionality will soon come to its official mobile apps. It is also working with mobile carriers to implement similar functionality capability for non-smartphones to send photos via text message (MMS).
Moreover, all photos will be marked “powered by PhotoBucket,” and will connect to a page that empowers users to sign up or sign in to their PhotoBucket accounts via twitter to further edit, share or save photos, PhotoBucket says.
Hashtags will now deeply focus on images. Hence, when you search for a particular hashtag, you will be presented with a huge catalog of photos. For instance, if you were to search #launch, you would see oodles of images related to space shuttle Endeavour’s latest voyage. Considering the role Twitter has played in organizing events such as the uprising in Egypt in January or tracking natural disasters like the March earthquake in Japan, this could be an interesting way to follow and document what is going on around the world in real-time.
As far as search goes, Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey wrote in a blog post that “not only will it present more relevant tweets when you search for something or click on a trending topic, but it will also show you related photos and videos, right there on the results page.”
In addition, the enhanced search tool should give users easy access to more relevant Tweets when searching for something or clicking on a trending topic, especially for those using a new version of Firefox browser — called Firefox with Twitter — typing a #hashtag or @username directly into the address bar will now go right to a search results page.
When questioned as to why members still can not search all the way back in their Twitter archives, Costolo stated this was a deliberate decision. The company actually has the whole history of tweets (for everyone) stored somewhere. “We had a choice to make between real-time search or whether we are going to surface a super-fast archive search. [Our] immediate focus is on more relative, real-time search,” explained Costolo. “Right now it goes as far back as we feel we can surface the more relavant search results as fast as possible.”
At the All Things Digital D9 conference, Twitter’s CEO Costolo mentioned the site gets 13 billion API requests daily. Mobile use rose 150% since January. The site processes 1 billion tweets every six days; the first billion took three years. Also, advertisers reap a high rate of return. The Volvo ad had a 50% engagement rate, according to Costolo. Twitter supports around 600 advertisers, up from 150 at the end of 2010.
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