With sites like Tumblr and Pinterest , and apps such as $1 billion Instagram, blazing a trail, the visual web is rightly attracting a lot of interest.

For example, a short while ago I looked at Wavii, which aggregates topics into a visual search engine based on your Facebook interests.

There are others too though, and they are getting both users and investment.

Dirk Singer, from the Rabbit agency, has blogged on ten of the hottest visual products emerging at the moment. These included Jux, a beautiful blogging platform, EyeEm, an Instagram like photo sharing service that is on Windows phone, and 500px, “a high-end Flikr”.

While it’s easy to dismiss such services as for hipster art students and people sharing pictures of their breakfast, new visual services have some serious uses too. For example, Singer points out that cancer charity Race for Life used EyeEm to promote one of their huge charity run events.

Additionally, there is growing evidence that these visual based sites are powerful marketing tools for brands too.

Back in May, Bottica.com published data that showed that Pinterest generates more revenue for companies than Facebook.

Despite Facebook’s efforts to make brand pages more visual, by allowing things like pinning photos and creating cover photos, Boticca found that more website transactions came from Pinterest, that Pinterest attracted more new customers, and transactions via Pinterest were nearly double those from Facebook. Users spent longer on Pinterest.

What the data from Boticca.com showed:

• *10% of website transactions came via Pinterest, compared with 7 percent from Facebook.
• *87% of consumers visiting via Pinterest were first-timers, compared with 57% from Facebook.
• *On average, per transaction, Pinterest visitors spent more than double that of Facebook.
• *Pinterest has a 43% higher bounce rate than Facebook (average time spent on Pinterest was found to be 14.2 minutes).

It’s not just still photographs that are popular either. New video based app Cinegram even impressed Instagram’s Kevin Systrom. The iOS app promises users the ability to “create a stunning hybrid between photo and video by producing animated photos”. Viddy and SocialCam continue to grow. As data gets cheaper and connection speeds get faster, video apps are only going to get more popular.

In general, with the advent of HTML 5, CSS 3, and ever more powerful cameras on phones, sharing beautiful things online has never been easier, and the popularity of visual apps and websites only looks set to increase.