Facebook has bought Instagram, Lightbox, and launched its own camera app - Facebook Camera, leaving little room for existing competitors offering similar services. PicPlz was a true competitor to Instagram, but with that startup now under the social networking giant's wing, PicPlz hardly fits into the picture anymore.
Instagram rival PicPlz will bow out early next month and delete all images and data in its possession, the company announced in a blog post this weekend. On Friday, June 1, the photo sharing service announced the closure on its Web site, alerting its users that PicPlz will cease operation on July 3. "It's been a pleasure bringing picplz to our users, but we have decided to move on to other projects and have made the tough decision to shut it down," announced the Seattle-based company.
Save Your Photos While You Can
The photo-sharing service then sent out emails to users on June 3, notifying them of the upcoming closure. "On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently and all photos and data will be deleted. Until then, you can log in and download your photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in your photo feed," explained the email. "Thank you for your support of picplz and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you."
Back in 2010, PicPlz and Instagram were the two clear competitors. Instagram had an adoption rate twice that of PicPlz, but PicPlz had the necessary support, and seemed to win the race. VC firm Andreessen Horowitz initially invested a small amount of capital in both startups, but due to a conflict of interest it eventually decided to fully support PixPlz. Moreover, PicPlz also seemed to be winning because it had both Android and iOS support long before Instagram debuted its Android app.
The PicPlz photo-sharing app allowed users to share mobile photos, and featured integration with various social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. After Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, however, other photo-sharing apps seem to have little chances of survival in the competition.
Time for Other Projects
According to TechCrunch, now PicPlz has decided to leave the race and focus on other projects. TechCrunch also published an email received from Dalton Caldwell, a PixPlz board member, revealing the team's next steps.
"As a board member I have been supportive of the strategic decisions they have been making. In terms of this specific move, as has been stated before, the team that is operating picplz has been bootstrapping (ie not raising money)," wrote Caldwell in his email, as cited by TechCrunch. "As part of this bootstrapping effort, they recently launched a paid iPad app for Pinterest users called pinflip: https://app.net/pinflip. Pinflip has been doing very well and is currently the #5 paid iPad app in social networking in the US," added the board member.
The PicPlz co-founder and board member Dalton Caldwell reportedly sent this email to TechCrunch in response to all the reports portraying PicPlz as the loser in the battle for mobile photo sharing. Caldwell first commented back in April on the Hacker News thread to defend PicPlz, encouraging people to ignore the gossip in the tech industry and the score-keeping fueled by the media.
