Within the past few weeks two new photo sharing apps have been released—Color and Pixable. Color allows users to see the photos and videos of anyone currently using the app in their vicinity. Pixable, unlike its predecessors, is a photo aggregator, letting users access all their pictures—even from Facebook—in one location.
The photo sharing app market already boasts Instagram and PicPlz, both of which let you add an artistic photo filter to your images and upload them to your social network profiles and feeds (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and others). There are also Path, Burstn, Hipstamatic, and Camera+, just to name a few more. And for those who want to share their artsy pictures with their grandmothers, there’s Postagram, a new mobile app that for $0.99 lets you send a postcard of one of your Instagram images to anyone in the U.S.
As can be seen by the large number of photo sharing apps, a market exists for them—and investor interest is up there as well. Among cell phone owners, the camera is the second most used feature after SMS/text messaging. According to New Media Measure™, 50% of cell phone owners use their camera feature on at least a weekly basis. And, as we all have likely experienced, social media has gone through the roof, with 67% of U.S. consumers partaking in social networking related activities at least one hour a week. So combining the two is only natural.
Despite the photo apps’ potential and recent growth—Instagram reached its 2 million mark just four and a half months in—there are too many that do too much of the same. Though the new kids Color and Pixable distinguish themselves from the crowd, it might already be too late in the game for them to succeed. I currently have five photo apps on my phone, of which I only use Instagram on a (somewhat) regular basis. Up until today, I didn’t know Hipstamatic lets you post photos to your social networks (goes to show how much I use it). And last week I did a test run of Color here in Santa Monica, and after being the only person in my feed, quickly gave up. Unless an app offers a completely different experience—along with a user-friendly interface—I will find myself slowly deleting these apps until all is left is the one lucky winner.