Last week, Twitter rolled out its new photo sharing feature, and now they’ve announced they’re sharing the Twitter Media Upload API. This will allow developers to attach images to tweets.
Jason Costa, who works on Platform at Twitter writes:
If you’ve used OAuth Echo for image uploads, you’ll find that the new method available at POST statuses/update_with_media is simpler and requires fewer dependencies. One of the first things you’ll notice about this method is the host name: status updates with media can only be executed on upload.twitter.com rather than api.twitter.com. Using this alternative host name for the upload path ensures high availability and flexibility.
Please adhere to our display guidelines when rendering Tweets with media. Be sure to link the URLs included in the Tweet text to the original URL, and the Display URL should be displayed as the anchor text for the link. For example, displayed text should read pic.twitter.com/SLUG, and not t.co/SLUG. It’s also important to note that our rate limits still apply – expect to see HTTP 403 errors returned if the user is over their daily media limit or tries to exceed the number of updates allowed. PNG, JPG, and unanimated GIFs will be supported.
More developer talk on this topic here.
Twitter also said it will soon incorporate the media upload feature in its mobile clients.
If third-party Twitter photo services like TwitPic and YFrog were worried about Twitter’s native photo sharing service itself, the API and pending mobile app implementation should only add to the concerns. Although, it’s not as if they wouldn’t have expected this.
Twitter’s photo service is powered by PhotoBucket.
