Twitter to remove third-party image hosting sites from official apps - report

Twitter is reportedly planning to stop offering third-party websites as image hosting services on its official apps, reports Buzzfeed. According to the publication, sources close to matter informed that this change might happen as early as the next app updates.

The micro-blogging website currently allows users to host the images in their tweets on Twitter's own service and third-pary options like Twitpic and yfrog on Android, while iOS app has more options including Mobypicture, Twitgoo, Posterous and img.ly. As per the report, after the next round of application updates, there will be no options and the images will be uploaded to Twitter's own service.

The change is unlikely to sit very well with the image-hosting websites, but they have no other option, and the similar sentiments were echoed by Twitpic founder Noah Everett in a statement to Buzzfeed.

"They're trying to control those eyeballs on their apps, they're an ad-based company, and they make money that way," said Everett.

The change will give the service more control over the user experience in its applications. Other popular online social networking website including Instagram (now Facebook owned) and Facebook already use their own servers to host images.

The change is consistent with company's recent offensive against third-party developers and websites. Twitter had earlier dropped the name of the source applications from tweets as well on its web interface, official iOS & Android apps as well as Tweetdeck.

Other major changes from Twitter include modifications to its developers API, which was widely seen as a crackdown on third-party Twitter clients. The changes introduced include limits on the number of times client applications can call Twitter APIs, as well as a limit on the number of total users an application can have before it needs Twitter's permission to continue.

It was recently in the news for blocking "find my Twitter friends" feature for Tumblr, and before that Facebook's Instagram.