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"Fotolog, which launched in May 2002, is an established player on the photo-sharing scene.  The latest stats show that it has passed 4 million members (up from 3 million in April) - that compares to 19 million on Photobucket, and around 30 million on Yahoo photos.\nThe site is massively popular in Latin America - the vast majority of users come from Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Mexico.  In fact, almost a quarter of Fotolog users are Brazilians, while only 610,000 users come from the US.  According to the founder, a Brazilian journalist wrote about the site on her blog in the early days.  As a result, many of the early users were from Brazil - after that, a huge snowball effect kicked in.\n\nThis seems to be a trend with social networks: Bebo has achieved network effects in the UK, MySpace dominates the US market, Skyblog rules in France and Mixi has taken over in Japan (although the last two have less competition, since they're in foreign languages).  What's more, it doesn't seem to matter where the site is based: Google's Orkut is ruled by Brazilians, despite being a US company.  That could also explain why MySpace is so huge despite poor technology: they seeded it with the cool people.\nFotolog offers free and paid versions, but the free account is extremely limited: you can only upload 1 photo and receive 10 comments in your guestbook per day.  Paid members are referred to as \"Gold Camera patrons\" - they can upload 6 pictures a day and receive 100 comments per photo, which still seems fairly low.  A Gold Camera account costs $5 per month, but you can also pay every 6 months ($25) or once a year ($45).\n\nThe service offers all the standard stuff: you can upload photos via cellphone or email, add friends to your network, join groups, track your visitor stats and browse users by country.  You can also customize the color scheme of your page, and Gold Camera users can upload their own header image.  These user pages are referred to as \"flogs\" and the users are called \"fotologgers\".\nHowever, it seems that Fotolog has run into technical problems in the past: back in December 2005, they limited the number of signups to 1,000 from each country per day.  In fact, the site was down earlier today when I tried to test it, and they still limit signups to 20,000 free members per country per day.  That's pretty ridiculous: how do you expect your site to grow if you limit the number of signups?  Nonetheless, Fotolog recently took on funding from BV Capital and 3i (they've raised a total of $7.5 million so far), and they're using the money to beef up their infrastructure.\nFotolog might not have the most impressive feature set, but it does have a large community.  I expect they'll see steady growth over the next few months.\n\nAttention Fotolog Users!\nMashable's Fotolog account is at fotolog.com/mashable - if you're a Fotolog user, feel free to add Mashable to your friends list.\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/08/10/fotolog-4-million-users-and-counting/>