Info 202 Fall 2011

Google has released a new Photo Sharing app on iOS devices named Photovine in July. This application is one of many photo sharing applications now already exists on iOS and Android devices, such as Instagram and Piictu.

Some say Photovine is Instagram+Piictu. Photovine loses the functionality of filtering pictures like Instagrams offers, yet picks up the feature of grouping photos into theme from Piictu. 

In this application, a vine is a constantly growing photo cloud with a unifying theme that the vine is named after. Users are able to 'like' or comment on a particular photo displayed; and interactively, users can upload their own pictures to contribute to the photo community. Once a user post a picture on the particular vine, this vine will automatically fall in the the 'watch' tab; a watch tab is similar to RSS but in this case, it's RSS on a vine. Photovine grows in two ways, one is the feature of 'fresh' 'popular' and 'watching' vines, where new pictures are uploaded; the other way is the social networking strategy. Users are able to follow friends on this app. The activities of followed friends can be viewed in Activity tab, as well as notification and basic messages through inbox tab. 

To tinker the '202-ness' in Photovine, we can think of vines as a way to organize photos. Enormous amount of pictures are uploaded by the users. Compared to Instagram, tags were used by some tech-savvy users where most of users don't even know such functionality existed. Photovine now has large amount of data yet the developer don't have to worry about categorizing anything since the users will categorized the photos in their desired way; being able to categorize as desired help creativity and innovation sharing between users. The purpose of having pictures 'grown' on vines is for easier user interaction and increased users' pleasure and satisfaction for social photo-sharing. Every time a user uploads a picture, the users assigns the photo to a vine; if the vine didn't exist, the user can then create a new vine. Choosing or creating a vine happens before the picture is finally uploaded. We can think of vines as a hidden, ignored and undiscovered feature that other photo-sharing app didn't see which makes Photovine unique.

Please read more here about original article for reference: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20094111-285/how-to-use-photovine/