FINALLY!

When I logged in this morning to my Twitter account, I was immediately bombarded by this giant announcement:

I don't know about you, but I've been wondering when the day was finally going to come that Twitter would became savvy enough to implement their own picture function.

Before, if I wanted to upload a picture from my computer, I'd have to go through Twitpic. In the grand scheme of things, this isn't that big of a hassle, but you are going to encounter people who don't think the process is worth it and would rather post the picture on a site who's function is easily embedded, such as Facebook and now Google+. For Twitter this wasn't great news either, as Twitpic is a client site, so people were navigating off of the Twitter site to post photos.

I'm aware that a large percentage of people who are uploading pictures to Twitter are doing so via smartphone. I could be wrong, but I believe the majority of these pictures are ones that were taken directly from the phone and easily uploaded with the click of a button. So this new picture function will not affect people who upload solely for that reason. I do use my phone a lot to upload pictures I have taken, however, when I want to share a picture from my computer, it is usually from a website. Now Twitter has made it a whole lot easier to share pics from the web for me and anyone else who falls into this category.

I have no doubt that this new feature was in part a strategic move against Google+. Last month, I read an article from Business Insider debating whether Google+ would be a bigger threat to Facebook or Twitter. The argument was that most people who were able to get in on the early field trial were treating the new platform more like Twitter than Facebook. The "circles" feature rivals Twitter's "lists" in the sense that you can selectively choose who you are receiving information from. However, "circles" goes one further to let you decide who you want to see what you are posting out there. Google+'s "resharing" feature is pretty much a copycat of the "retweet" feature introduced by Twitter (however, it is important to note Facebook's "share" button as well).

In this sense, Google+ was able to beat out Twitter by allowing users to easily embed a picture into their post. They still have the upper hand on video embeddings, as Twitter has yet to offer this, but both offer geo-targeting functions and link embeddings. Although Twitter has (somewhat) recently restructured their links by shortening them within your tweet to provide more space, it still takes up a certain amount of characters. And of course, there is no character limit to your posts on Google+. But hey, that was the original idea of Twitter in the first place wasn't it? It was meant to be no longer than the length of an SMS text.