Skylines is a different type of image search engine. It works in real time, and is constantly gathering new data from Twitter and Instagram. In 2011, most of the images were Twitter based, however now 43% of images come from Instagram, showing a huge rise. However, a very low 3% of all images are geotagged. It seems that is yet to become a popular thing to do, although checking into places/locations using services such as Facebook or Foursquare becomes increasingly popular. How interesting.

This real time search engine is also collecting a huge amount of Hashtags as they are used with images. Over 30 million in fact have been collected in total allowing people to see images that are relevant to a hashtag that they may commonly use for example.

The company has also released a Real Time photo widget, which you can install on your own website or blog. It works brilliantly, and can be customized to match a particular topic that is trending right now, with their example being Hurricane Sandy.

This is a company that will grow to the future, the same as Pinterest. Images are so much more common nowadays with the faster internet speeds, more people gaining unlimited downloads and more people gaining access to the internet in general. Content is always king, but the image says a thousand words.