Twitter has just announced on their blog two new key bits of functionality: improved search and photos. The latter, we’ve obviously been all over in recent days, as we first broke the news a couple days ago. The former, we mentioned was likely coming as well. But there are a few details we didn’t know.
First of all, today brings a completely new version of Twitter Search that promises “more relevant” tweets, but also shows you related pictures and videos in the right-side pane. Even more interesting is that Twitter has partnered with Mozilla for a new version of the Firefox browser with Twitter built into the search bar. (There is also an add-on for current Firefox users.)
Notes Twitter:
And if you use this new version of Firefox with Twitter, you can type a #hashtag or @username directly into the address bar to go right to a search results page (try #idol) or someone’s profile page (like @nba). Simple.
And then there are photos. While this feature isn’t live just yet, in the “next several weeks” you’ll be able to upload a photo attached to a tweet right from twitter.com. This will work on the mobile clients as well, obviously.
Yesterday, we speculated that Twitter would be using Amazon to host these photos rather than putting them on their own servers. Instead, they’re partnering with Photobucket to host these photos. Interesting.
Twitter also says that they’re working with mobile carriers around the world to add MMS capabilities for simple picture attachment as well.
No word on the planned iOS 5 integration for Twitter, but that was to be expected. No way Twitter is allowed to announce that before Apple does at WWDC next week.