If a picture does indeed say a thousand words then the news from Facebook’s software engineer, Doug Beaver, that the site hosts 10 billion photographs is pretty significant. That’s the equivalent of 10,000,000,000,000 words. Admittedly the logic is twisted, but look at all those zeros.

Clearly there are a lot of images of people in silly hats doing silly things for all their pals to see. Nevertheless… 10 billion?! Mashable’s Stan Schroeder speculates on the impact of this for the photo repository sites, notably Flickr, believing that people essentially use the venues for the same reason, sharing pictures.

Is this true though? People with profiles on Facebook and/or Flickr use each venue differently, each representing their identity as they do so. The tools of the two sites are also geared to varying goals. When seeking to illustrate this very article, I won’t be searching Facebook for images; firstly I can’t as it doesn’t have the facility and secondly it wouldn’t return what I need.

Shroeder finishes his post suggesting that it’ll be interesting to see what photo sharing social venues will do to differentiate in light of Facebook’s wealth of images. I feel it’ll be more intriguing, to see not ‘what’ they do, but ‘if’ they do anything at all.