Look what just popped up on my Twitter profile when I visited via the Web today — you can now share a photo directly through Twitter by uploading your photos to Twitter.com instead of through TwitPic, yfrog, Twitgoo or img.ly.

I wonder how this will affect the third-party providers. The image hosting back end is provided by Photobucket, one of the largest photo hosting sites, which is an interesting partnership.

Here’s the scoop straight from the source:

About Image Uploading on Twitter
Uploading and sharing images on Twitter.com is easy! Below you’ll find a brief how-to and some answers to common questions about uploading images on Twitter – right from your Tweet box!

Where do I upload my image?

• When you click inside the Tweet box on your homepage or on the New Tweet button, you will see two small icons in the lower left hand corner, one for adding your location (a compass), and one for uploading an image (a camera).

How large can my image be?

• You’re welcome to upload any image that is 3MB or smaller.
• We’ll scale the image for you to fit into the display pane on the right side of your Twitter.com timeline.

What do I do after I hit the “Upload image” camera icon?

1. Clicking on the camera icon to upload an image will prompt you to locate the image you want to upload on your computer.
2. After you attach the image to your Tweet, your Tweet box should look like the one pictured below, with the thumbnail in the lower left hand corner, and the camera icon highlighted in blue. (Image 1, below)
3. Once you’ve added your image you’ll see the character count to the left of the Tweet button update. (A link to the image takes up some characters)
4. If you selected the wrong image or no longer wish to share that image, just click the “x” control in the thumbnail or next to the filename to delete the current image.
5. Then, simply enter any text you’d like and hit the Tweet button.
6. Once you’ve successfully tweeted, click on the Tweet to view the image in the display pane. (Image 3, below)

Image 1 – Camera icon is highlighted in blue after a photo is successfully added to a Tweet:

Image 2 – Please note: In some browsers, you may see the name of the file instead of the thumbnail:

Image 3 – Clicking on the Tweet will show the image in the details pane.

What does “powered by Photobucket” mean?

Twitter is launching a native image experience that allows users to upload images directly to Twitter.com from a computer. The images themselves are hosted by Photobucket.

Why can’t I upload images yet?
We’re rolling out this feature on Twitter.com over the course of a few weeks. If you don’t see the camera icon under your Tweet box, bear with us! You’ll get access to image uploads very soon.

Will Twitter continue to support Flickr, Twitpic, yFrog etc?
Yes. You’ll be able to view images hosted on most 3rd party images providers indefinitely.

What’s the deal with protected accounts?
Protected accounts will work the same way with images as they do with text Tweets: you won’t be able to see images from protected accounts unless you’re following the account.

What happens to the Exif data? I heard there are privacy concerns there.
We remove the Exif data on upload. It is not available to any consumers of your image.

Can you comment on an image?
Yes, you can do this by replying to the Tweet containing this image.

How do I delete an image?
You can delete an image by deleting the Tweet containing this image. Once a Tweet is deleted, the image will be be made unavailable. It may still be cached in some browsers and servers, but the image will no longer be available from Twitter.

Are you going to have galleries of my images?
Not at first. But in the coming weeks, we’ll add user media galleries, which will let you see the images a user has shared on Twitter.

When you do have galleries, will they only include images uploaded to Twitter or will other services be included? If so, which ones?
User galleries will include images a user has shared on Twitter, including those uploaded via other services, such as Twitpic, yfrog, and Instagram.

Will all images appear in search?
Unless you have a protected account, there is always a chance that your image will appear in search results.

If I have a protected account, will my images show up in search?
If you have a protected account, your images should never show up in search results.

If I delete a Tweet containing an image, will that image still show up in search?
No, deleted images will not show up in search results.

If I change my account to “protected,” what happens to my images?

• Images previously shared by you when your account was public will be replaced by an error page.
• Your images will still be viewable by your followers.
• If you don’t want anyone to see your images on Twitter, you should delete the Tweets containing these images.

Is there an image upload API? If yes, can I use it?

• There is an image upload API but it is not available to third-party developers yet.
• Third-party developers will be able to access the image API shortly after we’ve rolled out the feature to all users.

Via Marketing Conversation viaSocialMedia.biz

Some excellent advice — and a tech’s true insight — why it is a terrible idea to send huge files via email, especially if you don’t know who you’re sending to — if you’re sending Gmail-to-Gmail, feel free to throw around 25mb files, but please don’t assume large files are appropriate for email delivery, “Bottom line, sending a large attachment via email is relocating using the U.S. Postal Service as your moving company. It is painful, limited, and expensive,” via Why It’s a Bad Idea to Send Huge Files by Email:

Because of the MIME encoding used when sending binary attachments, your files expand 33% when sent via email. In other words, a 15MB attachment requires 20MB plus the message text, plus message headers.

When you carbon copy 20 of your friends & coworkers, a separate message is sent to each. 20MB x 20 = 400MB. That’s half a freaking CD.

If 5 of those friends are on the same small company email server, downloading those messages saturates the entire bandwidth of their T1 data line for nearly 9 minutes. Because each message has separate headers, it isn’t easily cached and gets completely downloaded by each recipient.

Compare this to uploading the same attachment to a web server, FTP server, file transmission service like YouSendIt, or video streaming site like YouTube. One copy is uploaded. The download is typically 8-bit so minimal expansion factor. The small business’ network can cache the content, so it’s only downloaded once then fetched locally from the web caching server.

Sometimes the community maintenance required for YouTube channel creation is too much for a particular client requirement or campaign and what is needed, instead, is a complete and comprehensive video upload to all of the current video sharing sites.

This Abraham Harrison LLC video distribution service offers a quick and comprehensive upload to over 30 video upload and social network sites, including the usual suspects but also including many other less-popular and less well-known social networks; however, in order to best cover all possible opportunities for brand video sharing, it is always a good idea to make sure the client brand experience and client video assets always exist exactly where and when people are looking for them.

In addition, the primary way people look for video content in today’s market is primarily through word-of-mouth and sharing; however, a more predictable and common way of discovering content online — and the only way of discovering the content if the word of mouth does not include sharing links — which is search.

Doing a comprehensive video upload and distribution is a way of stacking the deck towards the discovery of the content organically by flooding the search engine indices with client content — which can result in the ownership of the content.

Video distribution is an important strategy towards controlling and promoting brand perception online.  The secret sauce of the social web.

Via Abraham Harrison