Twitter, a popular social networking site, has added a brand new feature allowing users to "tag" friends and family members (Twitter users) in photos. Users can add up to 10 tags in a single photo.

Notably, Twitter's 140 character count limit is waived for this additional feature. This translates to "tagging" that is not counted as part of the 140 character count but as an additional option.

But iPhone users get to enjoy an extra privilege in Twitter. Twitter lets iPhone users upload multiple photos (up to four) in a "single" tweet. This functionality will be added to Android users and Twitter.com users soon.

Apparently, Twitter is starting to look and sound more like Facebook. With all the new features, Twitter definitely has a plan for the future.

The uploaded photos will display as a four-part montage in your timeline. Upon clicking one of the photos, the full view of the picture is shown. But in Tweetdeck (Twitter's dashboard), the pictures appear to simply follow one after the other, Mashable said.

A "photo tagging" feature is available for everyone. Similar to Facebook, a user can tag Twitter friends in a picture, and the friend in turn gets a notification. He or she can delete or approve the tag/notification.

Twitter also gives the control to the user as to who can tag you in a photo. But as dreaded, the default is that anyone can tag any other Twitter users.

But you can tweak the default settings to control users from tagging you.

Here is how you can fix the setting:

Your Twitter Account -> Settings -> Security and Privacy -> Under Privacy subsection -> you can choose one of the following:

- Allow anyone to tag me in photos

- Only allow people I follow to tag me in photos

- Do not allow anyone to tag me in photos

These additional features specific to photos show how much Twitter wants to give competition to Instagram, which enjoys a humungus fan following. Instagram already provides photo tagging functionality to its users.

Face tagging or photo tagging feature will certainly let Twitter take advantage of the increased density of its social graph.

"Adding the ability to link people to specific photos provide Twitter with information about the photo, also additional relational links between individuals on the platform," Tech Crunch said.

With the rumors of a potential redesign of the user interface of Twitter ala Facebook and streamlining of at-replies and hashtags, one can only say Twitter is ready to make huge changes and give direct competition to Facebook and the likes. What do you think of the new features?