If there’s one thing that keeps me coming back to Facebook, it’s the photos. Admittedly, I’ve largely abandoned Facebook as my social network of choice, but it’s still the primary way I can see what all my old high school buddies are up to. But photos often get lost in the shuffle of Facebook status updates, and there’s been no easy way to visit Facebook and look at just the photos or videos that friends have shared.
The New York City startup Pixable has built apps (for Web and for mobile devices) to improve the way in which we consume the photo feed from Facebook. Pixable makes it easier to view friends’ photos, listing them by friend but also by category. You can see, for example, new profile pics, most popular pics of the month, photos from family, as well as photos that are popular on Flickr and Instagram.
And now Pixable has added a new category and a new media type: videos. Pixable’s categories distinguish between videos that friends have uploaded themselves (home movies 2.0, if you will) and those that they’ve shared (from YouTube and the like).
A Better Media Browsing Experience
By adding video content, Pixable steps into the ring with a number of other startups who are trying to improve the browsing experience – particularly on tablet devices – for this sort of content, including ShowYou, which we’ve covered in the past.
As it stands, Pixable’s video offerings are only available via its Web app, not on its iPad or iPhone apps yet, although the startup is working on that. Pixable says it also plans to add better categorization for video content, to match what it offers for photos.
Pixable’s competition may not be just other photo- and video-sharing startups, as Techcrunch’s MG Siegler contends that Facebook itself may be launching a better photo-sharing app soon. For its part, Pixable says it still hopes to become the Web’s “social photo aggregator.”
