Sony Ericsson announced a slew of new phones yesterday, including the particularly drool-worthy K790i and K800i with their Cybershot-branded 3.2-megapixel cameras. But they’ve got some interesting software, too — a moblogging application that works with Google’s Blogger service. Assuming operators leave the application intact on the versions of the phones they sell, this could give moblogging yet another big boost.
That’s great; moblogging and photo-sharing is a wonderful application for cameraphones. But, like other blogging software from handset manufacturers we’ve seen before, it’s tied to a single blog provider. Which makes it great — if you have a Blogger site, and don’t use any of the other blogging or photo-sharing platforms out there. While it’s nice to see support for something other than carrier’s own systems, this is just a slightly different version. It’s an exclusive, rather than inclusive strategy. Obviously there’s some sort of commercial deal behind this, but this type of software should not only be more widely available, but support a wider range of platforms.
One topic we hit on a lot is the degree to which the mobile Internet should be a subset of the wired Internet, or something completely separate, or exactly the same thing, just on a smaller screen. I’ve argued that the answer is somewhere in the middle: I should be able to access just about anything I want from my mobile device, but there’s a huge need for mobile-driven applications developed with an understanding of the fundamental differences between mobile and fixed Internet use (and that doesn’t just mean screen size). But when it comes to things like blogging and social networking, the mobile tools need to be tightly integrated with the existing fixed services that people already use. If I’m a Flickr user, what I want is a mobile application that makes posting to Flickr easier, not something that will makes things easy only if I switch to Blogger. If I put my photos at MoblogUK, I want an application that makes using it better, not one that offers me improvements only if I switch to Typepad.
I’d imagine that in addition to commercial reasons, some might argue that these applications have to be developed to be tightly integrated with a particular service for technical reasons as well. I’m skeptical of that claim, though, given the number of blogging applications for the desktop that can support multiple platforms via the use of XML-RPC or other means.
So where does that leave us? We get applications tied to a single provider, and carriers are still trying to tie people into their own systems: just look at Sprint’s new Picture Mail Groups, which let users create online groups with which they can share photos. Again, this is kinda cool, but it can only be accessed from mobile phones if they’re on the Sprint network. This harkens back to the days when MMS interoperability was an issue, and was one of the reasons it stumbled so badly. I don’t know what network my friends are on, and I don’t care — so services need to be accessible from all of them.
Fortunately, there are independent providers trying to bridge this gap with more open solutions, like ShoZu. Another platform-agnostic service, Netomat, announced today that it can now work with Flickr to send newly uploaded photos from groups to mobile devices, optimized for their displays. While it doesn’t look like Netomat can upload photos to Flickr at this point, its integration with it and the ease with which it lets people share information from all different types of online sources via mobile devices shows the kind of mobile/fixed integration that’s needed.
We’ve already chosen the services with which we want to share our experiences and media and interact with our friends and other people; our mobile tools should support them, and add to them — not force us to give them up.
[tags]sony ericsson, google, blogger, moblogging, shozu, netomat, lifeblog, flickr, mobloguk[/tags]
Yeah, Sony Ericsson are supporting Blogger and no one else. Nokia are supporting a handful of sites, Blogger not being one of them. Guess who’s stuck with a Nokia and Blogger?
ok, let’s hang up a bit for a second. This is a *good thing*, it exemplifies a new industry awareness that a push to web technology should now be a simple prerequisite for a media phone.
What’s missing? Community is; the only thing that keeps a moblogger incentivised. Moblogging is not blogging, it’s as far removed as poetry is to novella prose.
Without a community, the person using blogger on their lovely SE won’t have any reason to continue posting, and there dies the partnership.
Now if the partnership was with an existing photo sharing site like Flickr or moblogUK (disclaimer: me and my mates), or webshots or whatever, there’s a community there to incentivise the poster.
Before anyone points out that this is aimed at your family and friends, your family and friends don’t give a toss
really, they love you, but they don’t 
Maybe a comment on your first post, but past that? de nada.
This is a wonderful step, I applaud it completely, but as every operator driven photo sharing site before it, in every locale, it is imo, doomed to complete failure. Show me the metrics, and I’ll stand down.
I like the partnership between SE and Google. And for the following reasons:
1- SE has previously done very little regarding moblogging. When they do, it creates a buzz, which is positive. Now “everybody” is talking moblogging… a rising tide lifts all boats. Most people dont moblog, never heard of moblogs. Now they can read about it in SE’s manual for the phone they just bought. They will try it, the scenario described by Alfie happens, and then they will move on, and moblog somewhere more fun, like moblog.co.uk or mobilblogg.net (disclaimer: Im on the crew)
2- The moblogrelated features, better camera, the BestPic function etc will benifit all mobloggers regardles of where you moblog. Maybe SE needed the parnership for this development? I guess it was difficult to fund development of better moblogtools when they couldn’t provide a moblog (hard to depend on independents). NOKIA have their Lifeblog, SE had -until yesterday -close to nothing.
3- The fact that a mobile manufacteurer does something so webrelated is very good. The symbiosis with phone providers and carriers is broken, and the carriers are sidesteppped. With more Wifi hotspots and Skype, both moblogging and phonecalls can be done regardless of carriers.
That manufacturers now are teaming up with webcompanies.. should not be a surprise. This is necessary for creating useful apps for the mobile internet, as mentioned in the article.
It’s generally quite difficult for handset manufacturers to support a choice of online services. The traditional options are:
A) Pre-install lots of separately branded apps that basically do the same thing, which is inefficient on memory space and leads to icon overload.
B) Use a standards-based approach (such as MMS or WAP), which requires no special client in the phone but leads to a lowest-common-denominator feature set and a sub-optimal user experience.
The approach we took to solve this with ShoZu is to make a dynamically configurable client connected to an open gateway server.
- Users configure their accounts at the gateway server via a web page, choosing where they want their photos and videos to go - Buzznet, Flickr, Textamerica, Webshots, more coming soon…
- The client dynamically configures itself when it connects to the server, switching features on and off and modifying menu options to fit the feature set of the chosen online service.
The result is a single, generic client on the phone, that works nicely with a range of online services.
This approach works well for integrating to online services that provide a fairly standard feature set with smallish variations (e.g. blogging and photo sharing).
For example, most photo sharing sites support a common set of features that you might want to access on the phone (uploading photos, uploading videos, adding tags, titles, descriptions, viewing other people’s photos, reading other people’s comments on your own photos…).
Andy Tiller
CTO Cognima (creators of ShoZu)