ShoZu, the best app for cellphones (or anything) – When its working.

October 25 23:05 2008 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

ShoZu: we send your pics for you.

Do you keep a social network? Sure you do. How about a blog? Affirmative. Do you have a photo hosting site to keep the family photos? Probably. So what happens if you take a picture and you want to share it to the world?

Clusterfuck heaven.

You take that picture, go to your photo host, upload it and type a few descriptive words. Then you take that picture, resize it, go to your blog, upload it and describe your day and the picture. Then you take that picture, go to your social network, upload it and update your status.

Sounds familiar? Very.

Unfortunately there hasn’t been much in the development of improving this redundancy – for PC’s that is. We’ve all seen the usual all-in-one online media presence sites but they never would like to automatically upload your files to your Multiply or Flickr anyway, so nobody really gets to see it unless you force them to go to your page in some obscure host site. ShoZu, a mobile app of all things, aims to fix all these problems.

ShoZu allows you, in the comfort of your mobile phone, to take a picture, complete with its GPS data, and send it to your choice of media host sites, blogs, and social networks without needing to send it more than once or retyping any tags or descriptions. Just like magic. Its so genius that I’m surprised the PC version isn’t as popular as Google these days. To top it off, ShoZu allows for further mobile posting on your Blog or update your social networking profiles or friend feeds. There’s also ways to add comments to blog posts or friends’ pages in there somewhere.

Sounds like the perfect app for media-juggling doesn’t it? Sure does. Unfortunately, its a little flimsy on my phone so far. The N82 has been trying to keep this app responding for the last few reboots but its failing. Granted, I’ve managed to use it a lot more than I thought it would be useful for, and its given me some pleasant surprises here and there, (when I set the uploads to auto, it uploaded a photo of my skateboard and shoes just after I took it, didn’t even notice) but its frustrating when ShoZu hangs whenever I take a picture, for example.  It won’t break your phone, but it seems to be sitting in my background process unresponsive and un-killable.

According to the site’s forums, an update with better support for newer N series phones (including N82) is on the way, but until then, they seem to regretfully suggest not allowing ShoZu to run in the background of my device, which will disable features like geotagging (embedding GPS data on the picture), feeds downloading in background, and background uploads/downloads.

While I could do without some of the background features, the auto-upload feature (if you’re not particular about adding captions to your pics) and the geotagging (I want to mark those pictures in a map without bothering to find where I was first) are some features I’d love to have.

I find it hard to complain though, as I wrote half of this blog post on my mobile with ShoZu, and it posted it just fine. I also changed my Facebook status and checked on my friends’ feeds on my device. Finally, uploading pictures to all my sites in just one click is already a feature that’s worth the install alone even for a non-mobile device.

You know what I can complain about though? Friendster. That ass turd of a garbage dump they call a social networking site isn’t accepting my ShoZu picture uploads, even after I went through the process of setting up my upload account for Friendster on ShoZu. I find it ironic that after all this hoopla about single-solution media upload services, in the end, we still have to do the manual fucking uploads on friendster. If you have a middle finger or two, please, show it to our good friends at Friendster.