Photovine, Google's answer to the mobile photo-sharing craze, went live in the iTunes App Store today.
The app, which is only available on iOS to start, puts a somewhat unique spin on social photo publishing by grouping images into common themes, or "vines." Vine topics can be straight-forward, such as the currently popular "Cutest Dog" vine, or it can leave a little more room for creativity, like "Things I Love About Summer" or "What's Going On Here?"
For a service that is only officially available on a single platform (iOS), Instagram sure is doing well. In less than 10 months of existence, the photo-sharing app has managed to gain 6 million users, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down.
While using the service is itself pretty straight-forward, it isn't always obvious how to build a substantial following. Most users won't attract thousands of followers overnight, but there are a few tips and tricks that can get you there eventually.
Should photographers be concerned about Google Plus? This is the subject on an ongoing debate right now, due to the wording Google uses in its Terms of Service - specifically parts that seem to indicate it will have rights to photos posted on the new social network. But some folks, including both professional photographers and an intellectual property attorney say the reaction is overblown. The issue is not a "Google" problem - it's something to consider before posting your images online, anywhere on the Web.
This week, the lawyers at stock photography leader Getty Images have decided to weigh in on the situation, too, as it relates to the company's Flickr Collection contributors. Getty's verdict? "We're OK with Google+," it says.
There's a lot to like about Google Plus, the new social network from everyone's favorite search engine: the design, the thoughtfully created and easy-to-use privacy settings (Circles), the built in mobile chatting (Huddles) and video chatting (Hangouts) features, the smart news reader (Sparks), and more. But if Google Plus had one "killer" feature, it would definitely be the instant photo uploads from Android.
Why is this? Because it's the one feature that will actually encourage adoption.
Thanks to the rich and flexible real-time API offered by Instagram earlier this year, developers are able to pull in not only images from the popular photo-sharing service, but also tags, locations, comments and other data.
Since the API was released, we've seen an uptick in third party applications that utilize it, some of them more effectively than others. This brings the service beyond the parameters of its native iPhone app, which was previously the only way to view photographs published on Instagram.
What would you do if Flickr shut down some day? Do you think that photo services like Instagram might be just the beginning of what could be possible in terms of social photo innovation? Is Facebook Photos just a place the share and forget, leaving a big demand remaining for archival storage of all the photos we're taking these days?
Such are the questions being tackled by a new startup called OpenPhoto.me, an open source project being built by long-time photo sharing guy Jaisen Mathai. OpenPhoto.me is a photo sharing app and it's a platform for other apps: it pushes all your photos, tags and comments into cloud storage that you own, on Amazon S3, Rackspace or Dropbox. Then you can grant any photo app access to those photos as you see fit.
There are reports that Facebook is coming out with a comprehensive new photo sharing application for the iPhone that will disrupt the entire iOS photo application ecosystem.
According to documents obtained by TechCrunch, the application is codenamed "Hovertown" or "WithPeople" and will incorporate the best features of the existing market leaders in the photosharing market such as Color (a technological leader, if not an actual market leader), Instagram and Path. The questions become: Is the app as innovative as its hype suggests? And how disruptive will it really be?
Twitter is getting into the photo-sharing business. This is a natural extension to the Twitter product and its stated goal of giving users a consistent user experience across all of its clients. But how will this affect other photo sharing services that have dominated the space in the Twitter ecosystem?
Social media research company Sysomos looked at all the tweets from May 30 to see what services people were using. Of all tweets that day, Sysomos found that 1.25% of tweets contained a link to a photo sharing service, or about 1/12th of all links shared. That translates into 2.125 million tweets that were pictures from third-party services. It is just one day of Twitter, but it's probably indicative of day-to-day trends. What third party services were the most popular?
Twitter photo-sharing service TwitPic has updated its terms of service to clear up any misunderstanding of who owns the pictures uploaded to the service. There have been controversies in the past year about media organizations using photos posted on TwitPic and not giving proper attribution or compensation to the original photographer.
TwitPic's new terms of service should clear up that confusion. In it TwitPic explicitly states that content uploaded by a user is the copyright of the respective owner. It is not part of the public domain and is subject to how the user, not media organizations, chooses to have it disseminated.
A new photo-sharing startup launches today in private beta, no doubt entering what it an incredibly crowded space. But ZangZing hopes that its approach is unique enough to make it stand out from the rest.
That approach differs from many of the other photo-sharing apps on the market in two key ways. First, ZangZing makes it easy to pull together photos from multiple sources, uploaded by multiple people into one single album. Second, ZangZing emphasizes privacy. Using a photo service, in other words, needn't be a trade-off between privacy and group sharing.
