Stipple, which thinks it’s a bit original in allowing people to tag images with Twitter names, has some new competition on the block. ThingLink which also lets you tag any image, is now launching Rich Media Tags, allowing anyone to interact with an image tag which might be embedded music, video, words, pictures and tags for people. Publishers simply connect their site, blog or Flickr account with the ThingLink platform and get an embeddable code to make all or individual images taggable.
These tags have now been created for Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Spotify, Vimeo, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and Twitter. The application is obvious: you can add promotional flyers to a branded product, or anything, thus enabling some kind of engagement of transaction to take place without someone needed to leave a page or site.
Ulla Engestrom, founder and CEO of ThingLink is of the opinion that Rich Media Tags increase the amount of time people spend interacting with an image, and thus on site and can lead to transactions. This makes sense. Canadian pop punk band, Simple Plan, is using it to reveal details of their new album via the album cover artwork for instance. And Berlin’s Morning Post used it to explain the Bin-Laden raid Situation Room in May.
It’s also being used by Savalanche, a Finnish social shopping startup to create ecommerce tags inside images. Last month ThingLink partnered with SoundCloud to add audio tags to images used by musicians on the site. ThingLink claims to be currently serving thirty million image views monthly.