Twitter is getting into the photo-sharing business. This is a natural extension to the Twitter product and its stated goal of giving users a consistent user experience across all of its clients. But how will this affect other photo sharing services that have dominated the space in the Twitter ecosystem?
Social media research company Sysomos looked at all the tweets from May 30 to see what services people were using. Of all tweets that day, Sysomos found that 1.25% of tweets contained a link to a photo sharing service, or about 1/12th of all links shared. That translates into 2.125 million tweets that were pictures from third-party services. It is just one day of Twitter, but it’s probably indicative of day-to-day trends. What third party services were the most popular?
TwitPic, even with its recent terms of service controversy, is the big leader of the group, with 45.7% of all pictures on Twitter that day. YFrog is second with 29.3% and Lockerz (formerly Plixi) third with 17.4%. With all the buzz surrounding Instagram and its devoted user base, it is a bit of a surprise that it only gets 5.2% of the market. If Instagram released an Android application, that would certainly rise. Flickr and MobyPicture round out the services with 2.1% and 0.6%, respectively.
The next on Twitter’s list of services to build is probably video sharing. TwitPic unveiled the ability to host and share video in February and there are services like Qik (bought by Skype, which now makes it Microsoft property) that integrate with Twitter. Video hosting and sharing is a bigger and more diverse market to break into with giants YouTube and Vimeo roaming those grounds.
