Twitter Is Launching Its Own Photosharing Service

Twitter has been completely emphatic about where developers should stake a claim, with Twitter Platform Lead Ryan Sarver warning the ecosystem to stay away from building “client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” 

Well if Sarver stays true to his word the Twitpics and Yfrogs of the world can just give it up now. According to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge of announcing its own built in Twitpic competitor. Like tomorrow, if things go according to plan (naturally this post might change that).

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone,  as photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low hanging fruit.

Twitter is flinging money around; It just spent $40 million on power user client Tweetdeck which represents 13% of its userbase. It’s only natural that they would spend more resources on photosharing, especially considering how much money is being poured into the white hot space and that images were the crux of the success of competitor Facebook.

I’ve got no details on what exactly the photosharing URL shortener will be if any (Twitter has owned Twimg.com for a long time) or what the Twitter for Photos product will look like. Just that it’s coming, soon. And if they’re smart they’ll put ads on it.

Google AdWords: Now With Images

Some AdWords ads on Google are now showing associated images — and getting much larger in the space they take up — through a “Show products from” Plus Box implementation that some are seeing now when searching at Google.

For example, try search for bluenile, which brings up a Blue Nile ad. Under the usual ad title and description is a plus symbol (called a Plus Box), followed by the words, “Show products from Blue Nile for bluenile.” If you click on the box, it opens up three product listings from Blue Nile, each listing with an associated image.

The most shocking part of this ad is that how much room it takes up. Here is the ad when it is closed:

When you click to open up the product results, the whole visible part of the page is consumed with this one ad. Here is an image of just the ad, that measures about 370 pixels tall for me:

The ad also shows on the right hand side, as Steve Rubel shows. I was able to replicate Steve’s findings, by searching for diamonds. This implementation is better, in my opinion, because it does not change how the natural/free results are shown but rather only pushes down other ads on the right hand side.

 

Images associated with search ads are not too surprising. We have seen implementations ofvideo ads in AdWords several times. It just seems to me that Google is willing to try anything now when it comes to ads, from video to images to multimedia and who knows what.

Do note that back in November of last year January, I reported that Google was testing product results within AdWords. But those product results seemed to have been powered by Google Base and did not contain product images.

Google has also been testing showing banner ads in image search.