Fresh from its acquisition of TweetDeck, Twitter apparently has another surprise in its social media bag of tricks.
In the microblogging platform’s ongoing effort to regain some of the market share lost to competing third-party Twitter platforms, the company is believed to be planning a new integrated photo-sharing service to take on the likes of Twitpic, Flickr, and others.
Sources speaking with TechCrunch reveal that Twitter could announce the service as early as this week. As a result, all eyes are now turning to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who is set to speak tomorrow at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
The Twitter photo-sharing service is all but certainly expected to become the company’s latest branded application.
Two months ago, Twitter director of platform Ryan Sarver made it clear in a Twitter post that Twitter is poised to ready to take on the most popular third-party services.
“Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no,” Sarver tweeted. “We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.”
Despite the fact that Twitter claims 90 percent of users presently access the microblogging platform via the company’s official applications, social media analytics firm Sysomos recently discovered that (based on its findings), 42% of tweets actually originate from applications made by independent developers.