There is a big shift happening. The mobile photo/video is the new status message. It’s a bit sized form of social expression that is quick, spontaneous, and appeals to such a large population of people that legitimate social networks can be built around it.  The proliferation of smartphones with better cameras has presented this huge opportunity, and so far Instagram has been kicking the most ass.

They have done a very good job of creating a user experience that is useful, fun, and inspiring. An experience so good that they just hit 5 million users and 100 million photos a day. However, they must keep their foot on the gas (and I’m sure they are) if they want t win because it’s far from over. Remember Friendster and Myspace who were also kicking the most ass? Facebook came and knocked them both the eff out, and hasn’t looked back since.

Right now, there’s Instagram, Picplz, Path, Streamzoo (see disclaimer below), With, Color, Foodspotting, Piictu, and a whole lot more. It’s crowded and competitive, and lookout, more contenders have just arrived and they are heavyweights.

In the light blue corner, weighing in at 300 million users, you have Twitter. They have started to roll out the new photos functionality to all their users. While Twitter supported photos a long time ago, the problem was with the presentation of visual content. The feed timeline UI worked perfectly fine for text based tweets, but completely falls apart for photos and videos. With the new release, they’re using a grid like presentation for photos (check it out here).

Now it’s presented in the right way visually and dramatically improves the user experience.

…And in the darker blue corner, weighing in at 750 million users, you have Facebook. Hot on the tails of the With.me release, TC released an article about their new iphone photos app. MG is digging it and the snapshots do look impressive:

Of course, keep in mind Facebook already generates an incredible amount of mobile photos and videos. They pretty much had/has the same issue as Twitter. The Facebook experience suffocates the user experience of mobile photos and videos because the UI falls apart for visual content. News feeds are great for status messages and notifications, but just don’t cut it for photos and videos. Especially on a mobile device.

Instagram took this opportunity by storm and built a successful model for mobile photos: social networking + photo filters/effects. There were plenty of apps out there that provided filters and effects but Instagram was the first to mix in the perfect amount of social. They lowered the barrier to be creative with your photos. Jeremiah Owyang said it better than anyone else on the planet:

I think he’s 95% right except for 1 thing, auto-tune became a fad and is already fading away. Photo effects are simply not going away.

This already red-hot space just went nuclear. It’s an interesting opportunity because it is a different type of social content with different dynamics. This space is still young, mobile is still young, and there is a big question remaining: Will Facebook and Twitter add photo effects (or even video effects too) to their apps and knock out a bunch of startups in one swing? People are already beginning to speculate…

You just can’t rule out the possibility. I personally think Facebook will be the one buying out Instagram in the near future, but that deserves another blog post.

(Disclaimer, I’m the Sr. Product Manager of Streamzoo. Follow me on Twitter @mvuinc)