TweetPhoto Aims To Take On TwitPic By Adding More Features. Will It Stick?

People love to share photos on Twitter, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to see many independent application developers focused on facilitating just that through tools using the micro-sharing service’s API. Many of them have been submitted to us, and we wrote about a few in the past, from stand-alone services like TwitPic, Twitxr, Pixim to add-on services from photo sharing startups, like ImageShack’s YFrog and PhotoBucket’s TwitGoo.

Now a new contender, TweetPhoto, has launched its service and plans to go head-to-head with TwitPic, which seems to have emerged as the leader of the pack with over 1 million users and traffic going through the roof (sometimes bringing along the same scalability problems that plagued Twitter for years).

In a way, TweetPhoto is more like Posterous, which allows users to micro-blog by e-mail and also doubles as a photo sharing service with Twitter integration (at least the way I use it). The service lets you upload photos by e-mail, mobile phone or the web, and automatically posts links to the images on Twitter and Facebook. Conveniently, TweetPhoto automatically geo-tags photos and offers decent search functionality and trending topics, features that are currently lacking on TwitPic.

TweetPhoto also added a social layer which allows you to tag, favorite and comment on photos but also see who favorited and commented on your own photos. It also offers a way for users to embed custom widgets on their blogs and of course even boasts its own URL shortening service, dubbed Pic.gd.

Of course, there’s no guarantee more features means TweetPhoto will stand a chance against TwitPic and other services that have been around for years. People seem to be comfortable with using TwitPic despite its lack of features (which is being worked on, by the way), and I doubt more features will make them switch any time soon. That said, if you were on the look-out for a Twitter photo sharing app that offers that extra bit of functionality, I’d suggest you give TweetPhoto a spin.