Recent estimates from the 1000Memories photo-services blog suggest Facebook now houses more than 140 billion uploaded photos.
This figure is roughly 10,000 times larger than the number of photos currently housed by the Library of Congress.
Based on recent figures provided by a Facebook engineer, “the social network oversees more than 200 million photos uploaded per day, approximately 6 billion per month,” reports Digital Trends. “TechCrunch also reported that Facebook users uploaded an estimated 750 million photos over the New Year’s holiday earlier this year. 1000Memories estimates that the typical digital camera owner takes about 150 digital images per year and potentially uploads 20 percent of all pictures to Facebook over the course of a year.”
The 1000Memories post calculates that approximately 3.5 trillion photos (analog and digital) have been captured since the invention of the camera, of which 10 percent were taken in the last 12 months.
Founder of TwitPic Noah Everett has released a new photo-sharing service called Heello (pronounced “he-low”), just in time to compete with Twitter’s newly announced photo feature.
Everett told Digital Trends that the microblogging site has been in development for the past year, and the timing of its launch is a coincidence.
“The idea for Heello for what it is now came out of hearing user’s frustrations (and even our own) of not being able to post text, photos, videos or do check-ins from one single service; they were all spread out among different sites and this confuses a lot of uses,” he explains.
The post compares Twitter and TwitPic: Tweets/updates are referred to as “Pings” while Retweets are called “Echoes” and viewing the Twitter stream is known as “Listening.”
“The jury’s still out on the future of Heello,” reports Digital Trends. “There have been a handful of Twitter clones that have been DOA, but Heello does seem to have a little more steam to ride off of for now. You do have to think that Heello is giving TwitPic some competition at the same time that Twitter introduced what’s seriously going to impact the photo-sharing platform.”
Twitter has made uploading photos possible for its users with a feature that shares images (up to 3MB).
Users can access the new feature on the Web version of Twitter by clicking on the camera icon (support for the mobile version is still in the works). Images are hosted by Photobucket and appear as links within the Twitter feed.
Hashtags can be added to the tweet to include images in Twitter’s search function. Users will also have the ability to comment on images.
“The founder of TwitPic, who turned down a $10 million dollar offer for the company in 2009, can’t be too happy about today’s feature launch from Twitter,” comments Digital Trends.