Flickr — remember Flickr? — charges $6.95 a month to share your photos to the world, if you want pro functionality. Buffer, the social media sharing and analytics company, charges $10/month for anything beyond the freemium crumbs. And Dropbox goes from $10-50/month, just at the consumer level.

But subscription revenue has been around a lot longer than even the oldest dot-com. Aria Systems, a software-as-a-service billings platform, put together an infographic with all the subscriptions that the average American — you know, the person who lives next door and just got an Android phone — pays every month.

It’s a massive $857/month … mostly because of items that we don’t typically think of as subscription payments, but actually are. Things like insurance, a mobile phone plan, and utilities. Even the biggest one of all: health care.

Over time, startups can only hope that some of this revenue, most of which is dumped into the laps of massive contenders in yesterday’s economy, will come their way.

Here’s the visual data:

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Buffer started as simply a way to buffer or space out your social tweets and shares, with some intelligence that, over time, ensured your updates published at optimal times for maximum engagement. But when HootSuite added auto-scheduling this summer, that specific niche started narrowing.

So Buffer re-engaged with partners, adding a big Twitter client as a partner, plus 49 other developer-partners such as Reeder, Pocket, and Feedly. And now the service is relaunching with a different focus and a different flavor.

“We’ve been working on this for the past six months,” Buffer co-founder Leonhard Widrich told me via email. “We’ve been collecting tons of data of how Buffer was used, how our now 50 partner developers … have gotten usage through our API, and where we see the future of sharing on the social web.”

The result is a refocus as a sharing platform.

Buffer doesn’t want to be a destination anymore; it wants to be a conduit. Content that initially needed to be posted at Buffer’s site or through the app is increasingly coming in via Buffer buttons in browsers or partner integrations. In fact, over 40 percent of the content that flows through the system is already posted via the API, Widrich told me, and that trend is increasing rapidly.

So the actual Buffer app is now refocusing on analytics and some cool social sharing jiu-jitsu. Here are some examples:

Buffer now reveals your top posts across all networks:

With a very cool new user interface, the new Buffer allows you to drag and drop updates from one social account into another:

And, smartly, copy top performing posts from Facebook, for example, to Twitter, to see if they get good engagement there:

It’s a smart upgrade, and it still comes with the benefit of optimum scheduling and release of updates, which should improve engagement with your audience, or just your friends.

But what I really like is that Buffer is adding some real user interface and user experience panache to a social sharing market dominated by HootSuite (which, full disclosure, I use frequently). Although HootSuite does a lot more than simply sharing social updates, its UI and UX leave a lot to be desired.

With 400,000 users compared to HootSuite’s five million, it’s up to Buffer to show that it can compete with the big boys.

photo credit: ryancr via photopin cc

If you haven’t heard of the tool, Buffer saves your tweets, posts, and shares in order to automatically publish them at times that maximize retweets, likes, and comments. That allows social media users to post any content at any time, secure in the knowledge that they won’t either overburden followers or miss the biggest opportunities to get their attention.

Source: Buffer

Buffering tweets in TweetCaster

This is a big integration for Buffer, and co-founder Leonhard Widrich is exited about the integration, which is in line with the company’s strategic goal of working with as many partners as possible:

“I think it’ll be really amazing to finally allow people to Buffer retweets and Tweets straight from one of the best Twitter clients on the web, which was one of the most requested features over the past few months.”

TweetCaster profiles itself as “the #1 mobile Twitter app” with millions of downloads and users, and features innovative functionality such as “zip it,” which allows you to simply not see messages from a particular follower or fan for a period of time.

TweetCaster can also cross-post to multiple social networks, search in very fine-grained ways just for images, or videos, or topics — features unavailable from Twitter itself.

Buffer, which has been around for some time, saw some competition when HootSuite, the social media management tool, added “AutoSchedule,” a function that does much the same thing. But HootSuite is focused on social media managers and marketers, while Buffer is focused on individual social media users.

One question that remains: How will Twitter’s recent API changes affect TweetCaster? Twitter has made it clear that the consumer/consumption space is one that it intends to own itself, with its own tools … and TweetCaster seems to be right in the crosshairs of that particular initiative.

However, by its very success, TweetCaster may have won itself some degree of special treatment. Twitter has no desire to anger its own users, whatever tool they’re using, and killing a popular Twitter client — the most popular, according to TweetCaster — would certainly generate PR problems.

(I’ve asked TweetCaster chief executive Evan Conway for a comment and will update if we hear from him.)

photo credit: Vainsang via photopin cc

“Instead of our users manually selecting what time they want to schedule or post their social media messages,” HootSuite chief executive Ryan Holmes said in a statement, “they can use our new AutoScheduler to optimize and automate the scheduling process.”

That’s a major benefit, because expert social media marketers know, along with the Teacher, that there is a time for everything. That’s the reason you never start a Facebook campaign on Friday, and it’s also why almost everything you know about marketing on Facebook is wrong for Twitter. Certain times — often evening and weekends — are best for Facebook engagement. Other times, including mornings, are better for Twitter.

Each of the social networks has its own community and rhythm, making it challenging both to know the best publishing moments and to execute on them.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s auto-schedule capability

Functionality to automatically schedule for optimum engagement was first available via Buffer. The Buffer App tweets and shares for you when the time is right and you’re most likely to get engagement. But now Buffer is getting serious competition from HootSuite.

AutoSchedule will analyze both your social activity and that of your followers. Based on that data, it will automatically deliver each message to your fans and followers at “an optimal time in order to maximize reach and avoid swamping followers with too many updates.”

The functionality will first be available in HootSuite’s browser extension, the Hootlet. Installed in your browser — HootSuite supports either Chrome or Firefox — it allows you to tweet and share to social networks. Later this summer, HootSuite will embed similar functionality in its main dashboard.

According to HootSuite, “it’s a surefire way to get the most out of social media initiatives.”

It’s also a surefire way to put extra pressure on the much smaller Buffer.

Image credit: Oleksiy Mark/ShutterStock