Okay, so I confess. I skim the headlines for a lot of the items in my feeds but don't read the actual posts. I knew there was an in-house Twitter photo service being rolled out, but I honestly thought it was just announced & done. On the other hand, I heard a few days ago that I might get to try out something new. I was very intruiged, but waited patiently for my turn at whatever this "something new" was.

Me, being the idiot that I am sometimes, didn't even realize at first (once I received notification tonight that my new feature was activated) what the new feature was. Like I said, I thought the photos were already implemented when they were announced. Then I logged in with my other account in another browser to compare the two screens, and realized how wrong I was. 

Now, if I'd read the original announement post--the link to which is below--I'd have known already that Twitter was partnering with Photobucket for their service. Anyway, in my very brief experience so far:

• Uploads appear to be fast--faster even than TwitPic via web. Granted, I've barely played with it so far, but what I have tried has seemed almost immediate.
• Image quality gets reduced a bit if the size is too big. I believe this is a Photobucket image size thing, but I haven't uploaded any large images to that site in quite a while so I don't remember.
• It's using Photobucket! While I'm sad that I can't change my username there to match most other sites, I've been using Photobucket for as long as I remember and I still adore it.

Now then, for things I want:

• Auto-link between our Twitter/Photobucket uploads to our pre-established Photobucket accounts! We can already link these accounts on the Photobucket end to tweet our uploads, how about going the other way around? Give us a "Twitter Uploads" album in our Photobucket account that they can go to, and we can later move them to other albums later. I don't know the back-end of the arrangement at all, but I'd imagine this would eventually save time and money on Twitter's end with the users hosting their own PB accounts, plus there has to be someone who uses Photobucket Pro, saving Photobucket on a little bit of costs as well.
• Mobile support! As of now there's no integration for the official mobile apps or TweetDeck, but the original announcement post states that mobile support including MMS support is coming. I'd assume this won't happen until the main site's feature is more established, but who knows? What I haven't tried is the mobile website to see if that works in place of an app or MMS uploads. I'll try that out in an hour or so and edit in my results when I get it done (or not, whichever the case may be).

Anyway, like I said I just got the ability to try the Twitter photos feature tonight, so I'll have much more time in the future to play with it more & report more on it later. 

Original post discussing the new photo hosting service: http://blog.twitter.com/2011/06/searchphotos.html