There has been a flurry of photo sharing apps released over the last year, with notables including Instagram, Picplz, and Path. These apps tend to focus on the photos that have been shared by your friends and people you know online — which aren’t always snapshots of things you’re actually interested in.
But what would happen if you had a service that took the opposite approach, allowing you to see photos of things you are interested in, even if they weren’t necessarily captured by people you know? Enter Skylin.es, a new startup that’s launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, that presents you with a personalized stream of photos that it thinks you’ll like, regardless of who took them.
To use the service, first you’ll be asked to connect with your Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts. The service will then scour Twitpic, Yfrog, and Instagram for photos it thinks you’ll like, using things you’ve liked on Facebook, the people you follow on Twitter, your current geographical location, and the places you check into most frequently on Foursquare.
In addition to offering a personalized photo stream, the service also offers real-time image search. Run a search for TCDisrupt, and you’ll see the images that were recently uploaded on the aforementioned image apps.
So far the company has developed applications for iPhone and Android, as well as a web portal at Skylin.es
The company plans to monetize by selling subscriptions (you’ll be able to access more advanced statistics and premium features); a firehose data feed; and ads. Publishers can also access widgets that canbe embedded on their site, displaying a photo stream of whatever interests they want.
Bradley Horowitz: I think it’s really cool.
Q: How are you going to make this into something that goes beyond just search, and more into an experience where you’re browsing?
A: We currently offer explorer — what we think are interesting topics. We have something called PictureRank, based on relevance, based on interests we show you pictures.
Q: I’m trying to think how this becomes big. Do you expect people start going to skylin.es?
A: With release of widget, any publisher… Gary V could put our widget on his site and include ‘wine’ as the keyword, and will post photos of wine. Expecting to grow from publishers.