Twitter has recently been moving towards self-sufficiency, downplaying the importance of third-party tools, and that's become apparent in a new blog post about image hosting. In 2011, Twitter started letting users upload photographs directly, but the image hosting was provided through a partnership with Photobucket. Now, Twitter has announced that in September, it turned on an in-house tool called Blobstore. Blobstore, Twitter says, lets the service scale up its undoubtedly massive hosting capability while reducing the cost of serving images. It's also hinted that Blobstore could be used for more than photos, saying that "we are adding other features and use cases" over time. We're not positive this means it's left Photobucket behind altogether, but it seems likely.

Twitter has previously been rumored to be working on its own video hosting, which could mean either another partnership or an in-house system. It's also added Instagram-like photo filters just as Instagram disabled support for Twitter cards. Unlike many of the recent changes, including new API rules, there's not likely to be much of a visible impact on users, but curious readers can find the technical details here.