Twitter has confirmed that it will be launching its own picture service to take on companies like Twitpic and yfrog.

In a move that is likely to scare third-party Twitter developers even more - remember Twitter bought TweetDeck last week - the company will allow users to upload pictures via their own service to the 140 character focused social network.

“Millions of people share photos on Twitter every day. We're going to make that easier than ever,” says Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s blog.  “Over the next several weeks, we'll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com. And of course, you'll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps.”

Surprisingly, Twitter has signed a deal with Photobucket, a company that doesn’t spring to mind when talking about photo sharing on Twitter, instead of Twitter picture stalwarts Twitpic or yfrog.

For users without smartphones, Twitter is working with mobile carriers around the world so you can also send photos via text message (MMS).

In related news, the company has also announced that it’s improved its search.

“Today we're starting to roll out a completely new version of Twitter search. Not only will it deliver more relevant Tweets when you search for something or click on a trending topic, but it will also show you related photos and videos, right there on the results page,” said Dorsey.

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.