Sharing Media From Your Mobile: Why Twango ?
I have previously discussed the explosive growth of media captured on mobiles and the need for sharing it, to make it work without putting too much burden on the users. A few interesting trends have emerged in the last few months. PixSense has picked up momentum and their solution was implemented by Telenor – great news for this Pakistani startup. At the same time, Nokia has been on a roll, acquiring soical networking and mobile ad startups such as Enpocket. Nokia has also introduced Ovi, a set of services for mobiles, which needs a post of its own. Twango, a media sharing application, is one of the companies Nokia bought for around $100 million. Naturally that caused headlines and prompted many (including myself) to take a look at Twango’s services.
With so many photo and video sharing sites (photobucket, snapfish, mobango etc) it can be hard to compare and select one. What is it that makes one media sharing site better than others? I believe its a combination of a few factors. Usability and presentation. Features such as online editing, tagging, time lines, subscriptions etc. Ease of sharing with people (without forcing them to register) and at blogs and networking sites. There’s the reliability and trust element as well; many don’t want their personal stuff uploaded to a random startup with sketchy privacy policies.
TM has posted a detailed analysis of Telenor’s Picshare launch and gave it a 6/10 rating. I recommend read the full review and the related commentary at TGP. In this post I’ll review Twango, its features and how it works. My usage scenario is simple and typical. I want to be able to share my media easily with friends and family anywhere in the world.
At Twango sign-up was fast and the interface was clean. Twango provides a simple way to keep your media segregated in public and private channels. It assigns users a secret word and attaches it to the user name. The combination of username and secret word becomes the email address. This email address (such as babar.abc@twango.com) is used to send media to your private channel. It is a compromise between ease-of-use and providing some level of privacy / security. Photobucket also use the same approach but I find its ad filled interface to be cluttered.
I like the no-download part, the no-hassle file sharing and its features such as retention of metadata in the system. In short Twango works for me and media sharing being a sticky application, I am not likely to switch. Tell me about your favorite media sharing application.
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Pakistani social website also becoming visible, I think we pakistani too have our own social localized culture website for our youth. like http://www.circle.pk Social networking should not be considered as all about making friends.
A good overview of Twango as mobile social medium.
I’d invite you to take a look at PakAlumni Worldwide, a social network set up initially for alumni from NED Engineering University but expanded to include all Pakistani Alumni to connect, share and collaborate.
There is a very large Pakistani universities alumni that wants to connect with other alumni and current students at their alma mater for the purpose of alumni giving. It’s driven partly by concern for the state of science and tech education in Pakistan that needs attention and help to remain competitive in the modern world. We have seen how the IIT system in India has helped catapult India into a great emerging power in economic and political terms. We in Pakistan need evolution of a similar system out of the various UETs in Pakistan. I believe the Pakistani diaspora can help in this effort.
@Babar: You’re welcome :)
Shaheer – thanks for the detailed review, you mentioned out some important points which were not in the post.
I’ve used Twango for over a year now, and here’s my two cents. I hope all readers will find it very useful.
The signup is very clean and simple. Agreed. However, the interface might take some time to get used to. But here’s a tip: there are no folders, rather, they have tags (or as Twango calls it, channels). Of course, you can use channels as folders. But in short – if you want to make things a little easier for yourself, first create a channel, then upload media into that channel. You can upload otherwise, without making a channel first – but you might get a little confused there.
There are multiple upload methods: basic (5 per instance), multiple (java required), Windows XP Publisher (or whatever… it’s on the side of the My Computer etc windows), and email. Email is VERY VERY flexible – you can dispatch photos straight away, without having to sign in to Twango at all. See their help for more info – you can send it, add tags, add geo-locators, make the pictures/videos private or public etc).
You can upload files other than video or pictures – you can even upload MS Word files – around 40 types or so are supported.
Their site is speedy, oh yes. And – for those who use GPRS like hell (I don’t, since I can’t be bothered to recharge my account now and then), they have a mobile version of their pages (m.twango.com, I think it is).
Images can be downloaded in different sizes (including the original size/resolution) but as for videos, only the owner can download them (correct me if I am wrong, but this was the case before Nokia bought it, then they allowed video downloads temporarily as their video protocol wasn’t working, and now, since the videos are back up, I’m not sure).
There’s an upload limit of 250MB/month, and 100MB per file. For the average user, I think this is more than enough, since DSL in Pakistan for the average home user doesn’t exceed more than the average 3GB (exceptions expected).
I don’t work for Twango, but I rave about them now and then. They’re former Microsoft Employees (as per some news resource I read but forgot to bookmark), and they’ve made a fine product. Yes, it doesn’t contain the bells and whistles of an image editor – but then – we have Photoshop and Picasa, don’t we?
Hope people found it useful.