Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram: Mobile photos are everywhere

December 21, 2010 6:23 PM
Anthony Ha
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It’s been a big week for numbers about photos. Yesterday, location-based service Foursquare launched the latest version of its app with support for photo-sharing, and chief executive Dennis Crowley said later in the day that the service was already approaching one photo uploaded per second. Competitor Gowalla said today that its users have posted 1 million photos. And mobile photo app Instagram also said it has hit 1 million users.

My first thought upon seeing those numbers: Damn, that’s a lot of photo-sharing. Instagram in particular seems to be growing super-fast. The service only launched two months ago — in comparison, Gowalla still hasn’t hit the 1 million user mark (at least, according to the latest numbers I’ve seen), Foursquare took more than a year, and Twitter took two years.

My second thought: Gowalla better get moving on deals with other photo services ASAP. As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler notes, a lot of Foursquare’s fast pickup on photos probably comes from partnerships with Foodspotting, Instagram, and PicPlz. Meanwhile, services like Instagram and PicPlz pride themselves on integrating with lots of other services.

At this point, with all these integrations already in place, none of these apps can try to differentiate by “owning” your photos. Unless you’ve got a massive user base like Facebook, the name of the game is making it as easy as possible for users to share photos on whatever site they want — that’s probably what investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital are betting on.

I think the folks behind Gowalla know this too, since they’ve already demonstrated an open-minded approach to integrating their check-ins with Foursquare and Facebook Places. On the photo integration front, however, Foursquare got there first.

  • http://www.bauser.com Michael Bauser

    OK, so here's the thing about Instagram/PicPlz users: They're mostly Facebook/Flickr/Twiiter/whatever users using Instagram/PicPlz to send photos to multiple services, right?. Instagram and PicPlz can grow quickly now because that multi-service userbase is pre-existing, but will they plateau when they run out of over-committed photographers? They need a good value-add is they're going to expand beyond that. Right now, they've got… filters?Anyway, you're totally right about Gowalla being screwed by its own inability to form partnershiips. At this point, they're so far behind Foursquare in size that nobody is going to make them a priority unless Gowalla recruits them.

  • http://www.meetingwave.com/ jb

    Didn't Yelp just add photos? And, Facebook is loaded with them. I under videos generate a lot of data, but don't HD photos as well? Maybe not a big deal but adds up don't it?

  • http://twitter.com/GaryCulliss Gary Culliss

    >>> At this point, with all these integrations already in place, none of these apps can try to differentiate by “owning” your photos.Actually, all of these photo sites do “own” your photo in the sense that the photo is located on their own (no pun) servers. What's being shared is a link to the photo, not the photo itself. In other words, they don't post the actual photo over to Facebook, but merely push the link over there. That's a big difference.

  • http://www.subprint.com joemccann

    There's yet another photo sharing app on the horizon, currently in private beta, called Poladroid.http://poladroid.meWhat I like about it so far is the “gamification” associated with the photos you take and how many you take to unlock features (like a client-side gallery of your pics after taking 10 photos). It keeps me using it.

  • http://www.venturebeat.com Anthony Ha

    Yeah, I guess part of the question is how big that audience of “over-committed” photographers is.

  • http://www.venturebeat.com Anthony Ha

    Ah, good point.

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