Well, that was fast. Just a week after opening up its Photovine photo sharing app to the public, Google is now planning to kill it off, along with its second — and not-yet-launched — app Pool Party. Google is planning to focus its photo-sharing efforts on Google+, and will be shutting down Slide, the company behind the apps, which Google acquired last August for $200 million. The Slide employees were developing the apps independently, which explains why they were being made for iOS initially and not Google’s Android. If you’ve already begun using Photovine, you’ll have a few months to preserve your data from the service before it’s shuttered.
Confused about what Google’s new Photovine photo sharing app is all about? Here’s a short video published yesterday that explains the service without blinding us with hairy-chested dudes. “Instead of just posting a photo, you plant it and watch it grow.”
Aside from the fun-factor of “vines” planted for random topics, it seems like the service could be useful for spreading images of real-time news stories (e.g. protests, disasters, etc..), similar to what Twitter does with text and hashtags.
Google’s new Photovine mobile photo sharing app for iOS is now out of private beta and open to public signups. Here’s how the iTunes download page describes it:
Photovine is a fun way to learn more about your friends, meet new people, and share your world like never before. It all starts with what we call a photovine: a group of photos around a single, shared caption. Start a new vine with a photo and caption of your own or add your photo/take on someone else’s vine.
It has a long ways to go before it can catch Instagram, which is currently the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Instagram has already passed 7 million registered users, who have uploaded more than 700 million photos. Google has a pretty big reach though, so products launched by the company can get really big, really fast — just look at Google+.
Here’s a short video that gives a small glimpse into how Google’s stealthy Photovine photo-sharing app works. Like we reported yesterday, it’s an app that’s focused around sharing photos based on a theme with both friends and strangers.
If you’re not convinced that Google is jumping into the photo-sharing pool head first, get this: the company has not one, but two stealthy photo sharing apps in private beta. Besides the Pool Party app that came to light at the beginning of the month, the rumored Photovine service has now materialized into a website — well, a landing page, at least. Read more…
Even though it seems like the photo sharing market is saturated with services competing for the world’s photos, the incredible growth of many young companies (e.g. Instagram) shows that there’s still plenty of untapped areas for growth, with mobile sharing being one of the big ones at the moment. A trademark for “Photovine” filed by Google earlier this month seems to suggest that the search giant is looking to expand beyond Picasa. Read more…
