In Startups: Answer added in topic Mobile Location Applications.
It's a Marshall McLuhan thing.
Until photo sharing became easy and widely available, point to point communication was limited to the phone and text-based email.
People don't like to type that much. An innovation on Quora is that their UI has a textarea that's very fun to type in; another innovation on word processing is Ommwriter for the Mac... these are very engaging platforms to type into. Email isn't one of these platforms. Twitter and the Facebook News Feed are, but note how limited the writing usually is - 140 characters or less...
It can be rewarding to type into one's blog. Text when published (Quora again being an example) can be a great way to connect with strangers. But we don't send long emails to our friends and family much... we'd rather talk with them on the phone than write them an essay, in general. Emails between family members, in particular, devolve into grunts of "call home" or "got back safe, wonderful visit." Gone is the art of letter writing, replaced by something called "search engine optimized content creation." People don't really write much anymore in long form, and almost never within the context of a point to point communication (perhaps a cover letter for a résumé or a business proposal constitute exceptions).
Photos broke this communication throttle between close ties wide open, with a side helping of broadcast potential. Photos convey a "light rich media" experience that can be encoded in a jiffy from any location and decoded just as fast by the recipient. Photos capture a milieu and a moment without having to open up Gmail and cook on the perfect words. Photos constitute a "social ping" that conveys presence without requiring much cogitation.
We now communicate with photos far more readily than with email (or any other form of text). Photos convey a "biological" richness that maps onto family and friend communication more readily than blocks of text. We created TinyVox in this spirit of "typing is too slow". Point to point communication should not resemble an essay contest, and photo and other quick rich media gives users new options for intimate communication that both sender and receiver find new and appealing.
And finally: babies and kittens.
See question on Quora
Why is there such a recent surge in funding photo startups?
Backlink: http://www.quora.com/Startups/Why-is-there-such-a-recent-surge-in-funding-photo-startups#ans605025
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