Photo sharing app PicPlz is shutting down in July

Early Instagram competitor could never catch up in users or funding

After Facebook purchased Instagram, it became clear that Instagram was going to become the king of photo sharing apps and it was only a matter of time before others started falling. We now have the first casualty.

One of Instagram’s early competitors, PicPlz, is shutting down, the start-up announced on its blog Friday. The service will officially shut down on July 3. No official reason was given.

Picplz, which has been around since 2010, was a similar service to Instagram, in that it allowed users to put filters on their photos, and to see how many users had viewed their pictures. Despite being a competitor to Instagram at the beginning, PicPlz quickly fell behind and was never able to catch up. Instagram was also founded in 2010, and by the time it got up to one million users, Picplz was only able to reach 200,000.

PicPlz was also never as popular with the VC crowd as Instagram. PicPlz rasied $5 million in funding from Andreessen-Horowitz in November 2010, and that was the extent of its funding. Instagram raised close to $60 million in funding, including a $47.5 million Series B round in March.

The full PicPlz blog post reads:

“It has been a pleasure bringing picplz to our users, but we have decided to move on to other projects and have made the tough decision to shut it down. 

On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently, and all photos and user data will be deleted. Until then, users may download their own photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in their photo feed.

Thank you to everyone involved for their support and guidance, and thank you to all the picplz users!”

Other photo sharing news

In addition to this news, there has been a lot going on in the world of photo sharing apps recently.

Instagram has been doing phenomenally well, ranking as the fastest growing website in the month of April, up 78% from March.At the same time, however, Facebook has been ramping up its own photo app goals, first buying up Android app Lightbox and then announcing that it would be offering the Facebook Camera app, which acts very similarly to Instagram.

Where this leaves Instagram in the long run remains to be seen, but it would seem that their impressive growth would give them some leverage.

PicPlz was unavailable to comment.

(Image source: rhodesbread.com)