Twitter deploys Aviary-powered photo editing, filter service
updated 10:30 pm EST, Mon December 10, 2012
Cold war with Facebook-owned Instagram continues to escalate
In a day shadowed by the wide reveal of Instagram's withdrawal of its tight Twitter integration, the micro-blogging service rolled out its own in-house mechanism to apply color filters to user-uploaded pictures. Twitter's filters are powered by New York-based Aviary, developer of image-editing software for the photo-sharing service Flickr.
Features added to the Twitter photo service include one of eight filters to reproduce the vintage photo look, a bird's-eye view to allow users to see how each filter would affect the photo in a single grid view, photo cropping, and an auto-enhance feature. All of the photo-editing features are now available in the Google Play and Apple App Store versions of the official Twitter application.
"From ordinary life to these special moments with artists, celebrities, or politicians, photos have always been this special thing for Twitter," said Bijan Sabet, a partner at Spark Capital, the Boston venture capital firm that also holds a stake in Aviary and brought the two companies together for the partnership talks.
