Due to significant improvement in network infrastructure across the globe, online properties are molding towards high-impact visual contents. Combination of such visual content with social media is providing rich content experience to millions of fascinated users. This is also helping social networking companies like Facebook to engage the active users in a massive way every day.
Following the trend, media sharing site TwitPic has also decided to expand beyond the world of photos today. The startup is launching video support today, which will allow users to upload video from the site itself, as well as from mobile and desktop clients that support TwitPic. TwitPic, which now has 17 million users, says that it is growing by over 30,000 new users everyday.
Certainly, adding the video support , apparently, is a logical next step for TwitPic, which has focused solely on allowing users to upload photos to Twitter until now. However, driving the users based on photo sharing has been challenging as rival like Yfrog already moved to next level by providing video sharing capability and Plixi was just acquired by social network Lockerz. Twitter also recently partnered with TwitPic and others to include inline photos in-stream in the new version of Twitter’s interface.
Of course, TwitPic, under the leadership of founder Noah Everett, has launched extensions of the core product, including TwitPic Labs to showcase innovative side projects from the platform. And Everett is working on a stealth startup called Heello.
However, the latest move has sparked the discussion over the re-branding of “TwitPic” name as it more justified with “Twitter Sharing pictures”. When Everett was banged with this question by techcrunch, he smoothly denied any possibilities of changing the name just because of having video support. He said
“We’ve found the term “Twitpic” to be ubiquitous with users when sharing a photo on Twitter regardless of which 3rd party service is used. Our name has been a huge benefit to us and the brand itself has spread world-wide now and even being included in popular rap song lyrics.”
Interesting enough !