Retro photo apps are all the rage. And for good reason. Fact: People love sharing pictures online. There are over 200 million photos uploaded to Facebook per day, which means there are more than 6 billion uploads per month.
Much to the chagrin of digital camera makers, smartphones are becoming more and more ubiquitous and are pretty much all you need to capture special moments or events as they happen. Thus, the old point n’ shoot cameras are increasingly being left behind to gather dust in the closet.
42% of Americans are using smartphones, and 49% of those users are accessing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook while on the move. Given our collective love of photo sharing and the increased use of smartphones to share all aspects of our lives, phone manufacturers and photo app developers have had to step up to the plate and provide quality products for our shutterbug population who are itching to instantly share their photos.
You all know that I love me some Instagram. It’s reliable, allows me to snap a picture, apply a cool filter of my choosing, and easily share my now hip and sometimes even retro-looking photos with my social networks. The popularity of this app is hard to debate as they recently hit 10 million users, and are focused on providing a great, free app to their users. The caveat to Instagram is that it’s only available as an iPhone app, and they don’t currently plan on expanding their app offering to other mobile platforms anytime soon. In my opinion, the fact that they have tallied up 10 million users on a single platform speaks volumes about the quality and ease of use of the app.
Instagram may be the hot ticket right now, but I recently came across competitor Streamzoo who might just give them a run for their money. Why? Well it’s doing a few things that Instagram is not. And that could be key.
Streamzoo’s app is available as an Android and iPhone app as well as a Web app. This broad platform support greatly increases their prospective user base. Even better – they encourage you to use hashtags when posting photos so your photos are organized into streams.
The use of hashtags also allows users to receive realtime feed updates, see what’s trending or connect with people in their stream with similar interests. It seems like Streamzoo is a little more focused on creating opportunities where a seemingly random photo can create a sense of community between users with similar interests. Hmmm, that might just be pretty wicked cool – and something that Instagram’s not quite doing.
As far as the actual apps themselves, Streamzoo and Instagram are well matched. With the release of their 2.0 update, Instagram actually added quite a few bells and whistles it was previously lacking. From a purely picture taking standpoint – both offer a wonderful range of tools that photographers of all skill levels can use to make a snapshot from their life on the move into something pretty cool.
So what about you, how do you use photos apps like Instagram and/or Streamzoo? Are you there just for the filters and editing tools? Or do you the like the idea of connecting with people with similar interests through the photos you are sharing socially?
Perhaps most importantly, what photo app are you using and why? Tell me about one I’ve yet discovered (please oh please)!
Photo credit: Mark
