With the recent launch of MxPix, a new photo sharing app on Mxit, viral photo sharing and filtering is exploding on the popular South African social network.

In its first two weeks MxPix, developed by Motribe, has attracted more than 200 000 users who have uploaded just over 70 000 photos. Users have also shown their appreciation for the photos uploaded by dishing out more than 130 000 likes.

In the first few days after the service launched Mark Griffioen, the Motribe COO, saw the need arise for a new way to share the photos. Griffieoen said that “After seeing the quality of images that users on MxPix were uploading and sharing, we decided to add the ‘share to Facebook’ feature to MxPix. MxPix users can now share their amazing photos with friends and family on Facebook.”

Facebook presented itself as an important part of sharing photos and giving users as much chance as possible to gain exposure for their photography.

Motribe then set out to allow users of the MxPix application on Mxit to share their photos on the Facebook Open Graph. To achieve this Motribe integrated the ability to link an existing Mxit account via Facebook Connect.

Nic Malan, part of the core Motribe development team, was responsible for taking on the challenges presented. “At a high level Facebook Connect utilises OAuth 2.0 and is relatively straightforward to implement as an authentication mechanism, though in attaching to an existing user account and on mobile we faced some interesting problems,” said Malan.

After a week of development Malan had solved the problems that he had faced and the Motribe team launched the MxPix Facebook integration. For the first time, Mxit users are now able to share photographs from their Mxit accounts to their Facebook accounts.