NEW YORK ― Instagram, Picplz, Color, Tracks — keeping up with all the photo-sharing apps popping up can be overwhelming. But in the future, you may not have to. Photo sharing will become part of apps and networks you already know, including Facebook and Twitter.
“Facebook is essentially a photo site,” Loren Appin of photo-search app Pixable told TechNewsDaily yesterday (May 14) during Internet Week here.
Indeed, Facebook is the biggest photo site on the Web, and photos are a key part of what people post. And Facebook wouldn’t have spent a billion dollars on a photo app ― Instagram ― just for the fun of owning an unprofitable startup.
“Right now you see a crazy amount of photo-sharing apps out there,” Appin said. “I don’t know if in two or three years you will. … I think a lot of the social networks are going to incorporate photo sharing in their apps.”
Some photo apps are already fading. Picplz, an Instagram-like app for Android phones, was briefly a star (when Instagram was for iPhones only). And an ambitious app called Color, which allowed friends or strangers to take a bunch of photos of the same event and compare their different perspectives, may have been simply too confusing.
Video-sharing app Socialcam is currently extremely popular, largely because it’s integrated into Facebook (and other social networks). You can post what you shoot and see what friends are sharing. The app might not have gone so big without the Facebook link, though,.
“Everybody wants to have photos on their applications without necessarily having a [strictly] photo-sharing application,” said tech investor Zach Aaron.
If Appin and Aaron are right, what does that mean for you? Probably less time searching for and figuring out new photo and video apps. You’ll be getting effects filters and better sharing options right in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other networks you're likely to be on already.
But at the same time you may miss out on the more intimate networks that the smaller apps offered as you get sucked into the (soon to be) billion-person Facebook Nation.