Photos 2.0 Round-up
Photobucket totally dominates the Web 2.0 photo-sharing and storage area according to the Hitwise report I started talking about yesterday .
For the purposes of this post, the distinction between Web 1.0 photo sites and Web 2.0 is a focus on their online presence and sharing on other sites and with other users, as opposed to the traditional approach of storage and printing. So what about flickr? People keep talking about them as the coolest thing on the block. What are they doing down there at the bottom of the graph? Well, actually, they are doing OK, with a 49% increase in market share between March and September of 2006.
Apparently, their rise is due to search engine traffic, though, rather than any social buzz malarkey. Because flickr encourages tagging and descriptions to a greater extent than other sites, its images are rising in the search engines. Knowing about that helps image searchers. When I’m looking for images for this site, for example, I always use flickr, not least because the ability to limit your searches to images with a CC licence really helps.
Is a relatively low market share for flickr bad news for Web 2.0? Not really. If you haven’t looked at it lately, Photobucket has actually adopted a lot of the features that drive the 2.0 trend. It hasn’t got groups or comments like flickr, but it does offer lots of options for sharing your photos elsewhere, such as your blog or facebook account. Strange that there’s no MySpace widget, but I know News International are pretty protective about third parties tapping into their audience. It’s the Web 1.0 sites that you need to feel sorry for, though:
Video sharing tomorrow…