ImageShack Launches Yfrog Social, An Ambitious New Full-Service Social Network

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More

ImageShack founder Jack Levin has certainly experienced the short end of the stick when it comes to building a company that works with the API of a larger social network.

In February 2009, ImageShack launched the Yfrog photo-sharing service, which quickly became one of the most popular ways to share photos on Twitter — back in the day, you may remember, the only way you could share photos on Twitter was through third-party applications such as Yfrog and TwitPic. But in mid-2011, Twitter decided to get into the photo-sharing game after all and in August it rolled out its own internal photo-sharing service through a partnership with Photobucket — which, of course, immediately caused significant damage to the Yfrogs and TwitPics of the world.

You’d think that being burned by a giant like Twitter in such a way might make Levin back away from the social networking space altogether. But it turns out, it really had the opposite effect: Now, he’s going after the space in an even more directly-competitive way.

Today ImageShack is rolling out Yfrog Social, a full-service social networking platform for the web and the iPhone. You can watch Levin talk about the launch and give a demo of the product in the video embedded above.

In short, Yfrog Social looks like a mix of Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, with the high-resolution photo-sharing qualities of an ImageShack or a Flickr. The core differentiators of the product, however, are its ad-free freemium paid business model and completely open API. These two things together, Levin says, mean that developers will be able to make apps that depend on Yfrog social, with no fear of being quashed.

It’s a hugely ambitious launch — crazy, almost. But hey, it could attract a following: In my experience using it, it’s a really beautiful and snappy site, with very thoughtful features for sharing and sorting your contacts. Also, you’ve got to hand it to Levin for not being cowed by the big players who are currently dominating the space. It’s very similar to what Dalton Caldwell is aiming to do with his new direction for App.net. Whether these efforts will be successful remains to be seen, but it’s pretty cool to see people try.

If you want to test out Yfrog Social, you can bypass the waitlist by following this link: http://yfrog.com/invite/techcrunch

Here are some screenshots of Yfrog Social for the web (click to enlarge):

ImageShack is an online media (photos and videos) hosting company. It hosts billions of images and videos for users around the world, making it one of the world’s largest independent media hosts. Imageshack.com, the company’s flagship product, makes saving and sharing images and videos free and easy. According to the web measurement from Quantcast, ImageShack reaches over 65 million monthly unique visitors. In February 2009, ImageShack launched Yfrog.com to offer simple image and video sharing...

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Yfrog is a website and Twitter service that allows users to share photos and videos on Twitter and to broadcast their life as it happens. It is free for users, and no registration is required. For Twitter users, videos or pictures can be shared with followers in just two clicks. Yfrog was launched in February 2009 by ImageShack on top of the same infrastructure that supports its hosting service. According to the website measurement service Quantcast...

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Jack Levin is the founder of imageshack.us. Before starting imageshack, he was a network manager and engineer at Google for over five years. Jack attended the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Missouri-Saint Louis .

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