Oublio tracks the top images from Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Flickr in real-time.
What better way to understand a social network than to see its users' very favorite things?
Oublio, a site that tracks the most popular images across a variety of the web's most popular networks, is trying to rank, and juxtapose, the most popular images from Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and Reddit. The images are by turns appealing and unflattering — most of all, they're revealing.
Checking Oublio over the past day, some patterns start to appear. Nearly every photo that makes it to the top of Flickr seem to be professionally-taken and edited photos of nature or architecture, as do a fair amount of Reddit's, which we found surprising given the constant flow of memes and gag images on the site's front page. The top Twitter and Instagram images we saw were driven largely by celebrities posting a picture and asking for "Likes" or retweets — not the most heartening collection of media. And, no surprise, most of Tumblr's top images were GIFs from movies and TV or picture collages from ripped from some realm of pop culture.
