Last year, Japanese camera makers reported a 42% drop in global camera shipments, with sales of entry level digital cameras particularly badly hit.   The cause was of course the proliferation of smartphones, and people using their mobile device as their main camera.

The current evidence is that this trend is if anything accelerating.  In July the Wall Street Journal reported that Japanese camera shipments had decreased by another 42% in the first five months of 2013.    

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One of the visual web success stories of the past year has of course been Snapchat. 

In fact, there are now 350 million daily photo shares on the network, up from 60 million February - an increase of 400% in seven months.

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On Business 2 Community, Jeff Bullas has looked at the Global Web Index, and pulled out12 excellent charts about social media use worldwide. 

They are here, if you want to take a look.  I’ll concern myself with a few of the findings that continue to point social media as a whole becoming more visual.

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In early June, Berlin based Instagram competitor EyeEm held its annual photo-hack day, where teams of developers spend 24 hours coming up with photo app ideas.

The winner was an app that shows you the exact place a photo was taken so you can try and replicate it yourself.  

Receiving an honourable mention though was Snapcat, an (Android) app that allows your cat to take selfies.

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Several weeks on from the launch of Instagram video, it’s worth having another look at how Vine is doing.  And the latest signs are not good.

Initially I thought that (Vine’s owner Twitter) could find some encouragement from the fact that app store downloads were holding up well.  

That appears to be changing if the above chart from AppAnnie illustrating Vine’s position in the UK iOS app charts, is any guide. 

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What’s been the impact on Vine following the launch of Instagram video a week ago? 

A look at App Annie shows that Vine downloads have fallen, but that overall it is holding its own pretty well, being ahead of Instagram in both the UK and US iOS app charts.

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Over the last few days there has not surprisingly been a fair amount of discussion around the merits of Instagram Video. Certainly not all of it has been positive.

Here is the thing though, I think the negative sentiment comes from people like me. If I am honest, my post yesterday where I gave more prominence to the anti rather pro arguments was motivated by a bit of wishful thinking.

So, I am certainly with Matthew Ingram in this GigaOm piece, who says that even 15 seconds of video can be tedious, and I don’t really have any great desire to see ‘amusing’ video vignettes in my feed.

But people like me are not really representative of the mass of users.

And on that note, here are three initial signs that Instagram’s owner Facebook will after a number of near-misses and fails, succeed. In particular at the expense of Twitter’s Vine.

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Why it will succeed

1 - Facebook is behind it.   The default social network for most people worldwide, Facebook has the means to make this work.

2 - Unlike other mobile video ventures, Instagram isn’t starting from zero. 

Instead Instagram has a user base of 130 million active users who will start seeing video in their feeds and so will be prompted to give it a go themselves.  

Despite now being part of the Mark Zuckerberg empire, Instagram also has adoring fans within the tech press community, who regularly start typing anytime Kevin Systrom as much as breaks wind. 

3 - Many of the social media success stories over the past year have been video based.  Snapchat or Keek anyone?

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On April Fool’s Day this year, one story caught my attention.   A US College Newspaper (unfortunately I can no longer find the link) said it was firing its picture desk and replacing them with iPhones. 

It was one of the better April Fools’ I’d seen because it was the kind of thing you could imagine happening. 

In fact the day before, a photo on the New York Times made headlines.  

Photographer Nick Lanham took a picture of baseball player Alex Rodriguez and it ended up on the front page.  Nothing special about that, except the photo was taken on an iPhone and edited in Instagram. 

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What’s the best alternative to Tumblr?  As recently as a few days ago I would have pointed you to Jux.  

What’s Jux?  Jux was an image-rich Tumblr alternative, set up by the founders of file-sharing service Limewire. 

Unfortunately a lack of investment means that Jux is closing everyone’s blogs at the end of August.   Now, when it comes to highly visual - and free - blogging platforms, I think Yahoo!’s recent $1 billion acquisition has the field to itself.

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