Jason Purdy's Virtual World

There’s a war brewing over the management of photographs taken on your mobile phone.  It’s not a hardware battle but one over software and services, and the stakes are huge.  It will affect billions of dollars and trillions of images.

As many of you know, Facebook recently paid $1 billion to acquire Instagram, a young and fast growing software company that did three things incredibly well: 1) made your images look great with a set of filters, 2) decreased latency to upload your photo, which can be painfully slow on a mobile network, and 3) allowed you to easily share to all your social networks.  By focusing on these three core principles, Instagram grew to become a threat to the world’s largest social network. The fact that posting images is the heart of social networking meant that Facebook simply couldn’t let Instagram get acquired by another firm and, as a result, potentially yield their core value to another player. It was a bold move and may turn out to be a coup when looking back a few years from now. The fact that Facebook released their much rumored Facebook Camera app less than two months after acquiring Instagram confirmed that the purchase was more about eliminating competition.

This is just one of many battles playing out in the new war over mobile photography software and services. I’m sure there have been conversations at Google and Twitter about whether to create a dedicated camera application, which begs the question: What will thesmartphone image landscape look like a year from now? Looking farther out than a year is challenging because of the incredible speed ofchanges in mobile technology. Just think: we didn’t even have the iPhone five years ago.

So, in 2013, when I want to take a photo and share it with my friends, the primary way in which I’ll be sharing won’t be hitting “send” to any service. Yes, people will still use email attachments, post to Facebook or tweet a photo, but the difference is that the primary sharing method will be done automatically, in the background, using the next generation of high bandwidth connections, for instance LTE.

This is one of the primary ways in which Instagram nailed photo sharing. While facilitating which services in which you wanted to share your images, geo-tagging or writing a title, Instagram is already uploading the photo in the background. Hit “post” and it seems instantaneous. Google Plus (G+) does this for all your photos in the camera roll and has become my images hard drive, all in the cloud. If only I had a better use for G+ besides storing my photos, but that’s another story.