Twitter to Announce Its Own Photo-sharing Service

The tweeted image of a jet that safely ditched in New York's Hudson River. Twitter is looking to launch its own photo-sharing service. Photograph: Janis Krums/AP

Twitter is to launch its own photo-sharing service to compete with existing services such as Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr, according to multiple sources.

The announcement is expected this week at the D9 conference in California, where the company's chief executive Dick Costolo will be speaking on Wednesday.

The service may be provided via the website twimg.com, which Twitter has owned since July 2010, according to Techcrunch, which first reported the plans.

One possibility is that the photo service will be monetised by including advertisements as Twitter tries to move to a more commercial model.

The move will be seen as further encroachment by Twitter on areas formerly seeded and exploited by third-party developers. Earlier this year, the company told developers to stop making their own desktop and mobile clients for displaying Twitter timelines – dismaying many who had created a competitive development environment while leveraging the Twitter API that hooked directly into its database.

Last week it announced that it had bought the UK-based Twitter client Tweetdeck for a rumoured $40m (£24m), confirming its ambitions to control more of the client space. Tweetdeck is used by an estimated 13% of its users.

The move into photo-sharing – a space made famous by Twitpic after the photograph of a downed passenger plane on the Hudson rivertweeted by Janis Krums in January 2009 – will be unpopular among developers, who may begin to question what areas Twitter does not want to control.