MySpace’s interest in buying Photobucket is an interesting evolution of the sector, according to John Borthwick, chief executive of Fotolog, a five-year-old site that features photo uploads as a springboard for  social networking.

“This is MySpace recognising the value of the media itself – they have the social network and it’s them saying: We want the media as well,” he says.

“They are continuing to push aggressively into photo and video-based media as they see Google and Yahoo! zero in on this area as well.”

Mr Borthwick says Fotolog itself has made major strides to become the world’s 26th most-trafficked site, with 7m accounts in more than 70 countries and 150,000 members being added a week.

On Monday, it announced a deal with AOL’s Userplane subsidiary that will add chat, instant messaging and video messaging to the site. As a photo-blogging destination it has become part of the micro-blogging trend of minimal text entries and images replacing words that includes Twitter, Tumblr and Radar.net.

While people say little, they stay longer, it seems. Mr Borthwick says they spend on average 25 minutes per visit, compared to around five minutes for Yahoo’s Flickr. It’s yet another twist on the saying that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

May 8th, 2007 in Internet | Permalink