In the current social-networking boom, one glaring oversight has been the dearth of mobile integration — a few things notwithstanding, like Helio’s MySpace arrangement, or mobile-specific services like Rabble. There are some mobile services here and there, and some blogging sites offer users the ability to moblog, but for the most part, outside more specialist sites like moblogUK, it’s little more than an afterthought. Moblogging, particularly integrating it into social networking, remains a largely untapped market, leaving a pretty big opening for startups to move into. (There’s a lot to be said in general about mobile social networking, but that’s for another post.)
Enter Mojungle. What YouTube and its flock of imitators have done for embedding video on MySpace sites and other blogs, Mojungle hopes to do with mobile content. Sure, users could put video on their sites before, but YouTube made it easy — same concept here. Mobile users email in videos or pictures from their handset, then paste in a link to their Mojungle flash player on their site (as I’ve done here), and the content is displayed in a slideshow format. Users can also insert links to individual pictures and videos, should they wish.
What I like about this approach is that Mojungle’s focus is simple: make this product, which does one thing, do that thing as well as it can. They’re not trying to take over the social-networking space, they’re not offering an exclusionary, closed-down service that only works for certain people. If you’ve got a capable phone and a web page somewhere, on any service, you’re good to go. Actually, it appears users don’t even need a phone, as items can be submitted by email as well.
Simply put, Mojungle does as advertised, which, in this business, is fairly extraordinary (check out SMS Text News for more thoughts on this). It’s not clear what the business model is, but operators could do a whole lot worse than striking up a deal with the company to market Mojungle to their users as a way to encourage MMS use, and give them something to do with their cameraphone photos.
Update: The ever-reponsive folks from ShoZu have added support for Mojungle uploads to the application.
[tags]mobile, mms, cameraphones, mojungle, moblogs, moblogging[/tags]
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