The Twitter-Facebook War Is Heating Up

John Gruber of Daring Fireball says putting out just a filters photo app is a bad idea. From his post Monday:

If Twitter wanted to make it easier to post photos as tweets, and improve the presentation of inline photos in your tweet stream, that I could see. ...

I also think there's a market for a killer iPhone photo filtering app: something less focused on retro faux-analog gimmicks and more focused on the sort of one-touch improvements you can make in desktop apps like Lightroom and Aperture. There are a slew of pretty good apps for the iPhone that let you make such improvements to your photos, but I still haven't seen one that's truly great -- combining a convenient fast workflow with aesthetically superior filters.

And, look, he's right. There is a lot of opportunity to innovate in this niche of mobile photo sharing.

In my view, there are four companies that have the opportunity to make a huge splash still in mobile photo sharing:

• Instagram/Facebook: 100 million users. The core product works great. Any new innovations that are smart will get usage.
• Twitter: Perfectly suited to mobile photos because it is a mobile service. Already shares a great deal of photos today through a perfectly boring and limited photo app. Its 175 million users will immediately start using the service if it's marginally better that the current offering. If it's as good as Instagram, it will spark mass usage. If it's better than Instagram, it will really generate a lot of usage.
• Apple (AAPL): Apple has massive photo usage on its iPhone. It also has signed up an enormous amount of people to use its iCloud service to back up photos taken. Yet, it's stumbled to come up with an app to allow easy sharing of photos. You would think this is a natural area to improve but it hasn't.
• Yahoo! (YHOO) with Flickr. People forget about the former king of mobile photos, Flickr. There's a good reason for that. It was totally neglected for the last seven years. It could have been Instagram. Even though nothing's happened at Flickr for a long time, it's got a great core app. Now it finally has some upper management love from Marissa Mayer and new SVP of mobile Adam Cahan. The company could still do a lot of interesting things with the core Flickr app and storage options to breathe some new life into Flickr. It can also play Switzerland to Apple, Samsung or others if it doesn't get its act together in this niche area.

The bottom line is that this burgeoning war between Facebook and Twitter is just getting started. Watch for more fireworks soon as they battle to own the mobile user in social.

At the time of publication the author had positions in AAPL and YHOO.

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This article was written by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.

Eric Jackson is founder and Managing Member of Ironfire Capital and the general partner and investment manager of Ironfire Capital US Fund LP and Ironfire Capital International Fund, Ltd. In January 2007, Jackson started the world's first Internet-based campaign to increase shareholder value at Yahoo!, leading to a change in CEOs in 2007. He also spoke out in favor of Yahoo!'s accepting Microsoft's buyout offer in 2008. Global Proxy Watch named Jackson as one of its 10 "Stars" who positively influenced international corporate governance and shareowner value in 2007.

Prior to founding Ironfire Capital, Jackson was President and CEO of Jackson Leadership Systems, Inc., a leadership, strategy, and governance consulting firm. He completed his Ph.D. in the Management Department at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York, with a specialization in Strategic Management and Corporate Governance, and holds a B.A. from McGill University.

He was previously Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at VoiceGenie Technologies, a software firm now owned by Alcatel-Lucent. In 2004, Jackson founded the Young Patrons' Circle at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which is now the second-largest social and philanthropic group of its kind in North America, raising $500,000 annually for the museum. You can follow Jackson on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ericjackson or @ericjackson.

You can contact Eric by emailing him at [e-mail].

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