Wanna Use Twitter's Photo Service Right Now? Become An iPhone Developer, It's In iOS 5

Last week, we broke the news that Twitter would be integrated with iOS 5. At the time, we also noted that the timing of the launch of Twitter’s new Photo service was calculated. The feature was launching because Apple needed it in place for iOS 5. Today proves that.

Apple has begun seeding the first builds of iOS 5 to developers today. And thousands are already trying it out. Given Twitter’s deep integration in the new OS, not surprisingly, many of them are testing the new tweet capabilities. Sure enough, iOS 5 uses Twitter’s new photo service, hosted by Photobucket. You can see some examples here — note the source as “via iOS” and the pic.twitter.com URL.

So while Twitter Photos is currently only officially live for employees right now, if you want to try it out, you can go become an Apple developer. That will cost you $99 a year, but you’ll get early access to iOS 5. (Though we don’t recommend you actually do that since this is the very first build of the software, and is likely buggy.)

This “shortcut” will allow you to cut in line of everyone else, who will get access to Twitter Photos through twitter.com starting later this week (it will take a few weeks for the feature to fully roll out to everyone). Here’s how integrated Twitter features will look inside of iOS 5.