I was at a party on Friday night and it was incredible to see that pretty much everyone there had a compact digital camera of sorts and were happy snapping away all night. With the acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo and Yahoo's announcement of a new community based web app called 360°. This will allow people to share photos. Bebo has been around for a while and is similar but obviously Yahoo has the marketing power to take the throne. Google have a similar offering around the corner and Microsoft have MSN Groups.

One thing that I did realise is people really don't know the risks of storing all the photos on their PCs without backing up the pictures. It's just not something that has been highlighted enough and I have over 5000 pictures and if I lost them would be devasted. Services such as Flickr allow you to have a remote collection of these which acts as a backup copy.

I found Flickr very impressive and the third party plug-in for iPhoto on OSX makes uplaoding photos so easy. I use this now to share my pics rather than emailing them to everyone individually.

Companies like oFoto have started to make movement towards a money spinning venture by selling prints and gifts from gallery photographs.

What's next is the question. Communities on the Internet are the way to bring large numbers to a site and offering blogs, instant messaging services and forums will make  them stand out from the rest. The race is definately on between the main players but who will come out on top?

The spread of Google GMail has amazed me. I think that the key to the success of that is the 1Gb free space, light interface and POP3/SMTP offerings. I think companies will have to give a little to encourage the main crowd to follow their offerings.