...getting to be a crowded field...
so, sharing images and video from your mobile device is nothing new (albeit a richer experience today than mere months ago, by virtue, among other things, of higher quality image capture capability and faster/fatter broadband wireless connectivity). indeed, it's been two-and-a-half years since i first posted on the shozu / flickr solution, two years since i commented on vizrea and zonetag (which introduced an early if somewhat rudimentary geotagging solution), a year-and-a-half since i reviewed fotojive and blip.tv, and, finally, about a year since i covered comvu, a mobile streaming/webcast tool... nokia's recently released "share on ovi" (a key element of the overall nokia ovi internet services initiative) is yet another take on this theme - an elegant community-oriented implementation of the twango assets nokia acquired last year. and, trust me, there are any number of other alternatives out there to share content to and from your mobile device on a real-time basis.
and then there are the clients, widsets/widgets or web-based solutions designed to maintain your (mobile) presence and/or participate on-the-go in your myspace and facebook communities. mashing various solutions together is getting easier and easier, e.g. with shozu installed on my n95, one click sends whatever image i capture directly to my flickr account where it's immediately cross-posted to my facebook. initial set-up is quite painless, and from there on the actual functionality is transparent to me. same can be accomplished using a variety of alternatives, many referenced in the paragraph above.
and the mashing up continues. the marriage of location-based data with user-generated content is well underway - and this goes beyond simply geotagging images with location-based metadata. it's more about adding social-oriented context to your content. what nokia is doing with share on ovi and its nokia maps are examples (and, sticking to my randomly self-imposed rules, i'm not posting here to do nokia promotions, so 'nuff said on that stuff). but there are other examples as well...
the folks at gypsii have come up with a variation on the theme that merits checking out. simple on-line registration process, simple application download to your device. while definitely not my style, i'll let them speak for themselves in the following excerpt from their website: GyPSii allows users to share their real life experiences in the virtual world using mobile devices and the web. It is a social networking, search & location based suite of integrated mobile and web applications - for users to share, view & upload pictures, video, text and POI (points of interest) with a Geo-location - place and track each other in their select communities. Find people and places, points of interest, map and navigate to them all.
ok... so, that may be a bit hyperbolic (i've yet to test out all of the features), but there is something cool about this, whether capturing an image and cross posting to facebook (simple couple-clicks plug-in) with relevant geo-related metadata and associated map, or just randomly sharing your real-time geoposition. thing is though, beyond the initial "gee whiz" factor, gypsii faces the same challenges confronting any social networking upstart - the value of the solution is directly dependent on the critical mass employing the solution - or, in other words, it's all about building your subscriber/user base. the cross-post to facebook does allow me to share location and content with non-gypsii users, but not necessarily to quickly interact with them. and the search and location and POI functionality are only as good as the user-generated data that's been shared by other gypsii users. the same, incidentally could be said of ulocate's "where" solution, notwithstanding "where"'s paid POI content. "where," and ulocate's recently-acquired "buddy beacon" are actually quite cool (the former being live, the latter only launched on helio so far), and, frankly, should have merited an independent post, but shit, i've been busy...
the point of all of this? there's a lot going on. the momentum is fast. the complexity is daunting. the moving parts are many. the number of players engaged no less so. .. watch this space.
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