i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

According to the New York Times, Silicon Valley is seeing a surge in new companies that focus on mobile photo sharing applications. Unlike many established competitors in the field, the new companies are developing mobile apps as a first priority and focusing less on the traditional web incarnation of their products. The photo apps vary in the features they offer, but often mimic the structure of existing social media applications.

PicPlz, one of the popular new apps, acts as a visual version of Twitter. It allows photographers to rapidly post photos and lets users follow a given user’s photo stream. With PicPlz, images are tagged with location metadata so consumers can view photo streams by the place images were taken. While mobile photo applications tend to have limited editing capabilities, some do offer filters, which change the overall appearance of the photo.

The competition is stiff for newcomers to the mobile photo sharing market, since Facebook and Twitter are already widely used on cellphones. The challenge for startups will be to differentiate themselves by offering features and an information organization approach that is particularly well suited to sharing visual media as opposed to text.

(from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/technology/11photo.html?ref=technology)