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According to several reliable sources, Twitter is in the mood to expand their services. They are acquiring a couple of businesses and are rumoured to be changing associated services that work with the micro-blogging platform.

On the one hand Twitter is believed to be in the process of acquiring AdGrok, which is a Y Combinator-backed keyword bidding platform that enables the automated bidding of contextual keywords on Google AdWords. This deal is expected to cost Twitter less than $10 million and may be helpful to them in future monetisation of Promoted Trends or Promoted Tweets.

Twitter is also supposedly ready to launch its own photosharing site, possibly within the next day or two. The launch of a photosharing site will be an economically viable and sensible move on the part of Twitter as it is likely to help them generate a lot more revenue through additional ad views and clicks.

In addition to these speculated developments, Twitter has already acquired TweetDeck just a few days ago. TweetDeck is a dashboard that allows brands, publishers and marketers to keep track of their important conversations. The acquisition cost Twitter $40 million, and will likely pay rich dividends in future.

An entire ecosystem of sites and apps that were built on the Twitter platform could be affected in the near future. Sites such as Twitpic and yfrog will have to change their core business if they hope to survive the launch of an official Twitter image platform. Similarly, apps such as Twhirl, Twitterrific and Seesmic could lose users to a Twitter-backed TweetDeck.

All of these near-simultaneous changes indicate that Twitter is indeed gearing up to make some major changes in the way they will do business or deal with third parties in the future. A lot of their changes seem to indicate a desire to keep users on their platform, thereby allowing them to maximise ad revenues.