Following the Yahoo acquisition of Flickr photo sharing service, the HP - Snapfish deal and the Heypix! - Cnet deal, it seems that web portals and digital camera manufacturers consider photo sharing as a killer application.
Digital photos amateurs have started with online photo sharing few yeas ago. Now millions of photos are publicly or privately displayed over the worldwide web while digital cameras sales have soared during this period. It is obvious that photo sharing is a way to recruit end users and even "networks of end-users". Once you grab a social hub, you will get his friends, family, etc.
At the beginning, Ofoto and Webshots were "traditional" web based services. Then Flickr has mixed social networking recruitment capabilities with photo sharing features, still as a web based service. Last (but not least) PixVillage brings kind of social networking (end users build their private networks the same way MSN Messenger do it) with P2P technology, which means digital photos are stored on the end-user PC and uploaded directly on their authorized contacts PC hard drive.
What will be photo sharing in the coming months ? hard to say, but one sure thing is that web based services will face storage and bandwith issues while their network is growing. Not P2P decentralized networks such as PixVillage. Online photo sharing could stay a free offer thanks to Pixvillage for end-users only benefit...