Do you remember when Twitter didn't have its own image hosting solution, back around June? Sites such as yFrog and Twitpic entered the fray, offering image uploading for the network, and Twitter's own solution proved less successful than the third parties. Today, that changed; Twitter now leads its own service, as ZDNet reports.
When Twitter released the t.co link shortener, some developers feared it would damage their own success within this nich market. Their fears were not completely unfounded since Bit.ly was impacted by the release of the link shortener. It goes to show, that when Twitter unveils a service on their own network, it will eventually catch on. Every third-party service for image hosting has now fallen into an uphill struggle against Twitter itself for image hosting, including yFrog, Instagram, and Twitpic.
Research from Skylines suggests that smartphones, such as BlackBerry, Android, and iOS handsets are the most common products for uploading images to Twitter. The biggest provider in the past, Twitpic, has a 30.6% share of the image uploading pie. When Twitter didn't have its own option, it had 45% of the image sharing market. While it is going to be a struggle for third parties to regain the lead again, and it may even be impossible, there will still be a market for the other sites that are available. Many people will not want to abandon their collection of shared images on a service, even if moving to Twitter's own service could eventually grow more convenient.
Just as a side-note, here is a pie chart of the clients used to upload images to Twitter, courtesy of Skylines.
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