PhotoBucket, the FIM-owned photo sharing goliath that sees over 25 million monthly uniques, is taking aim at becoming the dominant photo sharing service on Twitter. The company has quietly launched TwitGoo, a media-sharing service designed from the ground up to be Twitter-friendly, allowing users to share photos with only a few clicks (and movies are on the way).
PhotoBucket used to be one of the small guys, coming from nowhere in 2006 to emerge as one of the Internet’s largest photo providers. Much of its initial growth was driven by its ability to thrive on a popular social site – in this case it was MySpace, which previously didn’t have many easy options for embedding photos. Now the tables have turned, as TwitPic has come from a similarly unknown position to become the leader in sharing photos on Twitter. Traffic may still be relatively modest compared to more orthodox photo sharing sites, but with Twitter poised to become a mainstream phenomenon, media sharing is going to take off fast. PhotoBucket competitor Imageshack launched its own service in February. And now PhotoBucket wants a piece.
TwitPic is the dominant player in this space with over 1 million users, but the one-man operation is having trouble coping with its rapid growth – an issue that will likely become even more of a problem as Twitter becomes more mainstream. Conversely, TwitGoo is built on the same infrastructure that powers PhotoBucket and its sister site TinyPic, which means that it should have no problem coping with a massive influx of new users.
TwitGoo’s other advantage is that it will likely be perceived as more friendly to brands than startup services like TwitPic. At this point this isn’t much of an issue, but as more brands begin to embrace Twitter and create their own applications that tap into the service’s API, they’re going to want to direct any media-sharing functionality through a trusted service. PhotoBucket and its parent company FIM have already built relationships with these brands. And the site also screens content for obscenity – something that no small-time operation can do effectively.
The service itself will be familiar to anyone who has used TwitPic or any of its competitors. Users sign in to TwitGoo with their Twitter credentials and then upload a photo to generate a URL shortcode, which they can then Tweet directly from the service’s web interface. The site tries to maintain the look and feel of the native Twitter interface, importing user backgrounds and consistently placing links where you’d expect them. And in the not-so-uncommon event of Twitter downtime, the service features a backlog queue, which allows desktop clients and other API users to queue their submissions for when the Twitter system comes back up.
Of course, one of the things that has made TwitPic so popular is that it is integrated into many Twitter clients, including favorites like TweetDeck and Tweetie on the iPhone. TwitGoo is on very few of them, though it is hoping to catch up on this front quickly and is launching with a full API. The service is also in discussions with a number of major Twitter clients, though it can’t discuss specifics yet. This is really where the battle will be won or lost – on Twitter it doesn’t matter how nice your infrastructure is unless its third party clients support your service.
You nailed it with the last line. Their service could be out of this world but if the twitter clients are not integrating via twitgoo’s API they won’t make it.
It will be nice to have another player in this area, as I’m not head over heels about twitpic.
btw, not really that crazy about the name, they need to be extra awesome to get past that.
Agreed on the name. But I’ve seen way worse names succeed, and at least it sticks in your head.
Haha “sticks” in your head, like goo…
We also looked at twitspooge and twitload. Twitgoo won an office vote.
they are gonna eat twitpic lunch. the bigger guys always win.
“The bigger guys always win.”
Where do you live? I think that sentence should be “The better product always wins.” i.e. Google or Skype had much bigger competitors, but the incumbents lost the battle.
You guys need to have a cap on your Twitter or Twitter related posts.
While Twitter might be the hottest thing in tech right now, I think it would serve all of us if you combed the web for other interesting start ups.
It’s not just that, I have no data to backup the claim, but it seems like TC has been straying away from tech startup news and has output a lot more social media news in general. I realize there is a correlation with the two, but it seems disproportionate to say, a year ago.
One last thing I think it’s cheesy that their site design looks like twitter. That is all. Kthx.
Thank you for the great article! I think you have nailed the biggest challenge which is working with the best Twitter clients to be successful. We’re doing everything we can to reach out to those folks. Anyone should feel free to contact me at; bizdev@twitgoo.com
Follow Twitgoo on Twitter; http://twitter.com/twitgoo
Thanks!
Mike
goo means shit in hindi.
hopefully twitgoo will be better than its name.
lol, yeah that just sounds wrong, but i guess it’s not far off from twitpic which i always imagine twatpic
They should just change the name to “twitshit” after that last comment.
Another way to spread the “bandwidth exceeded” love I presume.
twitpic would be wise to sell itself for a premium now, while its still a leader in this space.
Been using twitgoo for a week now and it is fantastic. I want my mobile app integration!
There are already a couple of clients in the wild;
* Pixelpipe – they have an Android, iPhone, Nokia NSeries, and MMS integration to Twitgoo
* Airme – they built a very simple iPhone app that’s available in the App Store that has it integrated
Watch for a bunch more in the next week.
I don’t understand why twitter can’t add in-line picture/file integration like pownce did. They can clearly handle the bandwidth now. Then we wouldn’t need half as many of these 3rd-party companies to do the work.
I still like http://www.tweetube.com you can share multiple pictures with one link …
Here we go again! TechCrunch bashing a one man startup and encouraging a bigger company!
Every internet company faces downtime and twitpic is no exception. But that doesn’t mean its not good and it definitely doesn’t imply that the downtime is because its from a small time developer!
Twitter is not small time, but it sure has downtime
Actually, having a downtime is cool nowadays. It shows how POPULAR an app is
Well, objectively speaking, TC is presenting the pros and cons (see the last paragraph) of the “bigger company” over the “one man startup”, and the reality that if an app constantly goes into downtime, no matter how popular it is, people will switch to other services that can provide more uptime. Of course yes, the downtime isn’t because it’s from a small time developer, nor does it mean it’s not good – but then users won’t look at whether the app was by a single developer or large corporation. They just want an app that works all the time, if not most of the time.
“that sees over 25 million monthly uniques”
I love that you said ‘uniques,’ it safely flatters your main audience AND discourages the philistines!
No OAuth, no iPhone/mobile optimized version. Try http://img.ly/ – we have that!
Or they could fucking fix TinyPic…
go Mike Clark! go! This man knows scalability, and since they are delivering 7 Billion images a day on Photobucket, i’m sure Twitgoo won’t have a fail whale anytime soon…
Congrats..
I think TwitPic has already established itself as a leader in twitter photo sharing and taking users away from it will be close to impossible.
Problem is, once Tinypic gained popularity on social media sites like Digg and Reddit, they began hijacking the images with advertising and clickthroughs to the image itself.
If this TwitPic competitor gets any serious traffic, I would assume they would do the same.
I reviewed this site a while back on Twtbase and thought it was pretty cool, because it had the look and feel of Twitter.
http://twtbase.com/?p=1228
Thanks,
Zachary Collins
Looks like it’d be hard to tell which site is which! LOL
They both have their plusses. Noah *DOES* hold the high ground though with Twitpic. And knowing that cat (he’s also here in Tulsa)… he’s far from done.
Photobucket is wrongly linked in the article
“Users sign in to TwitGoo with their Twitter credentials… ”
STOP! STOP right there!
Why should ANYONE give their credentials to another website, this is just nasty and unacceptable.
Specially given the fact that Twitter now provides OAuth, so services don’t have excuses anymore to ask for Twitter passwords.
If you are a Twitter app developer, PLEASE check:
http://apiwiki....amp;param=OAuth
And help us vanish this password anti-pattern once and for all.
It was a debate for us – We’ll do OAuth, but at the moment most of the apps don’t support it either. Its also a bit of a complicated use case for people who use our api … how do they do the whole oauth scheme with twitter?
We’ll get there. UN/PW was path of least resistance.
Twitgoo… that name sucks!
Our latest rev, AirMe 1.08 with Twitgoo support, just hit the AppStore.
It runs on Photobucket’s great architecture and I’m an arch lover!