The battle of the mobile social photo apps has been taken to the next level today, high-profile but trailing startup PicPlz just made three big announcements that pose a big challenge to crowd-pleaser Instagram and the slew of other startups in this market. Not to mention Flickr.
PicPlz, which is lead by former Imeem music community head Dalton Caldwell and funded by leading VCs Andreessen Horowitz (who bailed from Instagram to invest in PicPlz instead), just announced the following: public availability of its Application Programming Interface for other apps to use its filters and widgets, support for users to publish photos under Creative Commons licenses and new analytics dashboards for brand advertisers using the service. The simplicity of Instagram just got challenged in a big way.
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Instagram, the best known (if not the largest) of the many social mobile photo apps on the market, exploded at the end of last year, hitting 1 million users in just 10 weeks. That company doesn’t even have a functioning website, but people love it.
PicPlz has a highly functional website. It will also now have integrating partnerships with other services around the web and mobile ecosystem that want to roll-in photo filtering, widgets for display of photos and other features the service offers.
The emphasis that PicPlz puts on preserving original high-quality copies of your photos, combined with the new Creative Commons licenses, means that mobile phone picture takers will have all the more incentive to take their photos for archiving and for free sharing using PicPlz. Creative Commons is a copyright system that allows publishers to communicate to the world the conditions under which reuse of their content is acceptable – like, as long as the original author is credited, or as long as it’s for non-commercial re-use. Creative Commons greatly reduces the friction that copyright often adds to media sharing, reuse and distribution.
And the brand dashboards! Instagram may be seeing a notable amount of brand adoption, but PicPlz’s new offering of a dashboard showing which photos got the most views over time and other numbers is going to be very compelling.
Put it all together and even Flickr is going to have to stand up and take note. This is a crowded market and startups are innovating quickly. Another competitor, Path, today added real-time commenting to its version of photos-on-your-phone.
Instagram has spread fast because people love it. PicPlz is now built to spread fast, these are smart growth hooks that have been added to the service. Which strategy will work best in the long run? That’s a question I look forward to asking in another 3 and 6 months.
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