Camera is probably one of the most used equipment in every household. We have it at homes, we have it in our mobiles, we take pictures of everything, all the time. We love taking photos and love watching them. No wonder the first thing people do after creating their social networking profile is browsing the photos of their friends and uploading their own. Moreover, social networking sites like Facebook also allow us to like a photo, comment on it and tag it, bringing the experience of browsing through the gallery to the next level.
Tagging, liking and commenting of photos was one of the clear signs that marketers noticed and started figuring out how to use it for their benefit. Thanks to 3 simple features, Facebook manages to keep us on their website longer than other sites. Quite quickly these features started to be a standard and Facebook is slowly killing picture giants, who were on the top not so long ago.
Lets take a look how it all started. In 2003 Photobucket entered the market, followed a year later by Flickr. These years definitely belonged to Google, so no wonder they also launched a photo gallery — Picasa. By that time, having your photogallery online was a hip thing. In 2004, everyone was taking photos and sharing them. Links to private galleries were flying around the internet.
No one expected that a social website for students will take over the internet. Yes, I am writing about Facebook. The site was already online, and in 2005 it launched its photo sharing features and opened for high-schools. By 2006, already big, Facebook opened to everyone and started conquering the internet world. The photo galleries had a serious problem, because their features were no longer so attractive and today it is clear to everyone that Facebook is the main place to see photos of friends. How did other cope?
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