When the news broke this past weekend that picplz, a mobile photo sharing app and service, was shutting down, it was a rude reminder of the Darwinian nature of the mobile app landscape. And picplz isn’t going to be the only mobile photo app to vanish into the mists of time. The reason for their misfortunes is none other than Facebook.

Picture Perfect

There are two main reasons why Facebook is a dominant Internet company. One, it is the first cross-platform and truly global identity provider. Second, it is the most constantly updated photo album on the planet. That is why photos are Facebook’s lifeblood.

Photos are the reason many of us continue to engage with Facebook. Facebook has tried many verbs to increase and maintain our engagement with the service – read, listen, watch. But in the end, it’s the photos that work wonders for the Mountain View Menlo Park, Calif.-based social-networking giant.

One of the biggest (and many) shortcomings of Facebook’s mobile app  is that it wasn’t simple enough for us to snap photos, share them and engage around them. Instead, what we got was a tired, convoluted little app. Facebook being Facebook knew that and had been quietly working on a mobile photo-sharing app called Camera that currently works on the iPhone.

The release of the Camera app came a few weeks after Facebook announced that it was going to acquire Instagram for about $1 billion in stock and cash. While many were confused as to why Facebook would have two mobile photo apps, in reality, it is a masterful move by Mark Zuckerberg & Company. Let me explain.

Private + Public Partnership

Facebook’s Camera app is a useful tool for seeing, sharing and interacting with photos that are part of your private social graph. Sure, you can share them publicly, but the app is meant to capitalize on our personal and private social graph. With nearly 900 million subscribers, Facebook is pretty much a giant here.

Buying Instagram brought Facebook access to the public graph. Instagram is more like Twitter thanks to its “follow” model. If your account is public, anyone can follow you, but you don’t need to follow them back. Instagram has grown rapidly to over 50 million people mostly because of this asynchronous model. Thus, when it comes to mobile photo sharing, Facebook now owns both private and public graphs and, as such, is on its way to dominating the mobile photo-sharing market.

In order to understand Facebook and the role photos play for the service, check out these stats:

•  In August 2011, there were over 250 million photos uploaded each day
• On average more than 300 million photos were uploaded to Facebook per day in the three months ended March 31, 2012.

The NPD Group estimates that in 2011 smartphones accounted for about 27 percent of all photos and videos we snapped, up from 17 percent in 2010. Now imagine when there are many more easy-to-use smartphones out there. Photo overload! And Facebook currently is one of the few companies that has the scale and size to store that many photos — an advantage that cannot be dismissed or overcome easily.

The New York Times art critic wrote a wonderful essay, Everyone’s Lives, in Pictures (I wrote something similar last year) where she quotes  Susan Sontag as writing:

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”

In the time of Facebook, that message is amplified. And the best is yet to come, some experts say.

Twitter vs Photos

As Facebook has shown, people love engaging and interacting with photos more than simple text. With Instagram, Facebook can start to take some attention away from Twitter, and that can’t be a good thing for the San Francisco-based company.

I am always confounded that Twitter hasn’t built a Twitter-only photo sharing app and instead has chosen to work with third parties for photo sharing. It is a mistake that can come and bite them later in their life. I would argue that in time, Instagram’s public graph can become as big–if not bigger–than Twitter itself. Like I said, there are more people likely to share and like photos than write tweets.

As I said earlier, if you look beyond Facebook and Instagram, if you look at the recent success of Pinterest, you know that pictures are big on the Internet. Why? Because we all love photos. Everyone can take photos and share them with their friends. Photos are meant to elicit emotion. And they are inherently social.

Unfortunately, that was a lesson not learned by Google and Yahoo, both of which had opportunities to turn their successful photo-based web properties into the beginnings of a social revolution. Google owns Picasa, while Yahoo owned Flickr, arguably one of the most influential web companies of the post dot-com era. Today’s social behaviors, the emergence of community, usage of meta-tags, a simple “follow” model and, of course, social validation were some of the key contributions of Flickr to the web.

Gizmodo, in a recent post, outlined how Yahoo mismanaged Flickr. (Thomas Hawk, a longtime member of Flickr, has a wonderful, if somewhat less read, response to the Gizmodo story that is worth reading.) If Flickr had embraced the post-iPhone mobile, Yahoo might have owned the mobile photo opportunity. Ironically, pre-iPhone, when Nokia was well known for its camera phones, Yahoo/Flickr were a pretty big deal in the mobile. But that is the way of the big companies — there is a desire to boil the ocean and build a big solution when the actual opportunity is right under their noses.

For Facebook, photos are no joke. The company will do whatever it takes to keep us engaged with photos. And as for other also-ran photo services, the reality is that like picplz, they will not even be footnotes in the history of technology.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Round 1: Sign-up

I was sort of hoping that Photovine would allow me to just sign in using my Google credentials, but maybe because Slide operates like an independent startup within Google, that’s not the case. Signing up is fairly easy though. It consists of just one screen, where you enter your name and email address, choose a username, and password, and optionally supply your phone number if you want to speed along the friend-finding process.

Instagram also features just one screen for sign-up. Enter your email, username, password and optionally a phone number to get started. The two are nearly identical, actually, with the only difference being that Instagram prompts you to choose a profile photo as well, although this is also actually optional.

Advantage: This is nearly too close to call, but I’m going to give it to Instagram. The photo profile prompt should mean that more people join with a profile that’s at least somewhat identifiable to people looking for contacts.

Round 2: Network and activity

This is unfair for Photovine, which just opened up membership to the general public today, but it’s worth noting that even after a month of beta use, I still only have three contacts on either Twitter, Facebook or in my address book, and I travel in early adopter circles. Even among the people I knew that I could find to follow, there wasn’t any content shared yet.

Compared to Instagram, which has 150 million photos shared as of the beginning of this month, and more than 7 million users, that’s not good. It means Photovine has a steep hill to climb, since most won’t require two social photo sharing networks that are pretty similar overall.

Advantage: Instagram. If you’re new to photo-sharing and want to go where your friends are most likely to be, there’s no question the older service is the better choice, unfair as that may be.

Round 3: Taking photos

Photovine uses a custom photo-taking interface that adds some visual flair to the standard iOS camera app, and allows you to switch between front and back cameras, choose whether the flash is on, off or set to auto, and grab photos from your on-device library if you’d rather share one you already took.

Instagram also uses a custom interface, but one that is more visually minimal. It also offers the ability to switch between cameras, set the flash, and get photos from your library. Instagram also allows you to custom-crop your photos to fit its square publishing format, while Photovine crops automatically. This might be either an advantage or an annoyance depending on your perspective.

Advantage: Photovine. For me personally, the autocrop gets it right far more often than it gets it wrong, which outweighs the extra step required with Instagram for every shot.

Round 4: Special features

Like the Badger app I recently covered, Photovine groups images around topics, called “vines.” You can add an image to a vine after you take it and before you upload it to Photovine, and you can either search for existing vines or create your own. You can then browse vines from the app’s main screen using the relevant icon on the bottom navigation bar. From the Vines tab, you can check Fresh or Popular vines, and see Vines you choose to “Watch” (or follow, in other words).

At this point, most will be familiar with Instagram’s special feature: the ability to add filters to your photos. This also happens right after you take or select an image, and Instagram has been pretty good about adding more selection as time passes. The filters are a pretty good way of making washed out or otherwise deficient mobile phone photos visually striking and interesting.

Advantage: This is another category that might depend on your personal preference, but I’m liking the vines concept so far. It makes browsing photos a little less haphazard, and because it really creates a small select group that goes beyond your own personal network, it also embraces a more playful side of social sharing.

Decision

Based purely on how it works, looks and feels, I’m going to have to give this one to Photovine. It really is a great product with a lot of promise, and unlike something like Color, it adds an element to mobile photo-sharing that actually enhances the experience. Once it grows its network, the vines concept should work even better. That’s not to say it will necessarily be able to take Instagram’s crown; the older app has a big lead, and the differences between the two are actually very minimal besides the vines concept, which may not be enough to sway some on its own. Still, it’s nice to see some decent options pop up in mobile photo networking apps.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• How to stand out in the app development game