Today's announcement actually has two part: one dealing with search and one dealing with photos. It also involves two new partners for the company: Firefox and Photobucket.

Twitter is partnering with Firefox in these improved search efforts - at least as part of today's announcement. With a new version of the browser, users will be able to type a hashtage or a @username into the Awesome Bar and go directly to the search results page. There's also an add-on that will give this same functionality. This makes Twitter search function much like any other address-bar-based search engine. (Well, except that it bypasses both Google and Chrome, of course.)

Twitter also announced that it has partnered with the photo-sharing and storage company Photobucket, which will be responsible for hosting these tweeted photos. In coming weeks, Twitter says, users will be able to upload a photo and attach it to a Tweet directly from the Twitter.com website. This will also be available via Twitter's mobile apps, and the company is exploring ways to Tweet photos via SMS.

Just as the new photo-sharing service will be unveiled over the coming weeks to users, it appears as though developers will also have to wait for more information about the new "'Tweet-with-photo' API." But as there are a number of companies who've staked their claim on providing just this sort of service - namely Twitpic and YFrog - the future of Twitter photo-sharing still appears cloudy.

As we reported last week, Photobucket is highly dependent on MySpace for a large share of its traffic. Keeping this in mind, it makes perfect sense for Photobucket to try to reach out to a wider audience across the Internet by giving its users more and easier options to share their content.

Making Sharing Easier

While posting from Photobucket is now significantly easier, it should be noted that this is not a solution that auto-posts your images directly to a selection of different social sites. You still have to individually post your images to every site separately, so this is not a replacement for services like Tarpipe or Pixelpipe.

Mobile Traffic Up

In its announcement, Photobucket also points out that traffic to its mobile site tripled during 2008 and continues to grow. Given that Photobucket's users trend towards being younger than those of other photo sharing sites, this makes perfect sense, but it is also a good indicator that there is still a lot of growth left in the mobile photo sharing market..

Is This Enough to Gain Back Market Share?

Overall, these updates, which also include a new 'live slideshow' feature, look like they are putting Photobucket in the right direction. The company has lost a large amount of market share in the last few months and is under a lot of pressure from Yahoo's Flickr. These new features will allow it to become more visible outside of MySpace, though we will have to see if this is enough to make a difference in the long run.

Declining Traffic from MySpace

Last July, Photobucket still got 54% of its traffic from MySpace, but last month, that number had declined to 38%. In the U.S., MySpace has now been surpassed by Facebook as the most popular social network and given how strongly Photobucket is tied to the fortunes of MySpace, we can only assume that this negative trend will continue for Photobucket.

According to Hitwise, neither Flickr nor Google's Picasa (the number two and three in the market) get more than 6% of their traffic from social networks - instead, these services tend to rely more on traffic from search engines.