It can't be easy launching a new photo-sharing site. After all, once you've uploaded hundreds of your pics to one place online, it's a real faff when you then have to upload them all again if you switch loyalties to another service.
Nevertheless, plenty of firms want Flickr's crown, and the latest is Pikeo, which has been launched by Orange. As you'd expect, mobile is strongly tied in, with the site providing a link to the ShoZu mobile application, which allows users to upload photos directly from their phones.
Presumably, Orange will be preloading the app on handsets sold through its retail stores if the community takes off.
It also has some really neat geomapping features, using Microsoft's Virtual Earth service to let users plot their photos against the locations where they were taken. There's a building buzz around this kind of stuff, but it's always been a bit fiddly to do if you're not technically minded, so it's a great feature to have.
Ultimately, you'd hope that location-based data could be embedded in the images when they're on the phone – Orange has access to this data, after all – and in the press release, says that's the direction it's heading in with the service.
It's interesting to see a mobile/broadband operator launching their own photo-sharing community, rather than opt to partner with one of the big existing sites. And there's a danger of confusing mobile users, given that handset makers are signing their own deals to put photo-sharing applications on their phones (e.g. Nokia and Flickr).