Ever since Instagram started to explode in popularity last year, lots of apps have been trying to capture the app’s success, but in the video sphere.
It makes sense. Video capabilities on Apple’s iOS devices, specifically on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, are quite impressive, and there are tons of video apps in the iTunes App Store that take advantage of their capabilities. The same is true of photography apps, but Instagram found rapid success in simplicity: it delivered a free app that allowed users to easily adjust their photos with filters and minor editing, and made them easy to share.
As TechCrunch reports, the race is on to find a similarly simple and effusive way to do the same thing with video. Viddy, one such app, is looking to be the next Instagram and had just pushed an update to make it more tightly tie-in with Facebook’s new Timeline feature, hoping to leverage the existing social network to increase its traction in the App Store. And it might work. Viddy is currently sitting pretty at the top of the iTunes App Store’s free apps list.
Viddy’s not the only video app vying for the title of The Next Instagram. Apps such as Mobli, Klip Video Sharing, Color for Facebook and plenty others are also in the running, but Viddy has seen some serious growth lately after introducing its Facebook Timeline app. Other video services are getting a big leg-up because of integrating with Timeline; Viddy reports seeing double the daily sign-ups since it launched its Facebook app, TechCrunch reports. VEVO says it’s seeing “exponential growth,” and Dailymotion has packed on another 9 million users since introducing Timeline compatibility.
That might be enough to put Viddy ahead of the competition right now, along with its slick set of app features. The whole app is built around 15-second videos, which users can edit, stylize with filters and share among social networks including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
So could Viddy be the next Instagram? Maybe, maybe not. While the app is seeing some real success thanks to Timeline, that’s not all that’s necessary to really take off in the iOS sphere. Instagram won accolades from Apple and others, which helped quite a bit, but more than anything it made its social network extremely easy to use. Likely that’s where Instagram really excelled: users could make cool photos, but they could also view images and share their own shots with almost no effort at all. In order to emulate Instagram’s success, apps need to offer not only cool and easy capabilities, but the means to make them as social as possible. And there are lots of apps looking to do just that.
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