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]
[...] 3) MobHappy: Carlo Longino of MobHappy, has written a very flattering piece on mojungle. “Simply put, Mojungle does as advertised, which, in this business, is fairly extraordinary.” Nothing in the world could have made us happier, Ophir, Andrew and I have put sooo much time in just making mobile easy. We believe mobile technology is amazing and just needs to be simplified. The review can be seen here. del.icio.us this! [...]
Is the access to MySpace from Helio phones the only way MySpace is “mobilized” currently? I’ve read about launching mobile access to MySpace in Europe, but I didn’t think that was via Helio. I might stand corrected though.
An interesting finding I made today is that for some reason blogging software is not a very popular download at GetJar, relative to IM, email etc. I wrote a brief note about this phenomenon. I doubt teenagers are uninterested in blogging from phones, so I have yet to find out why this is so. Any clue? Current solutions not good enough?
Anders,
I know teenage moblogging in the US has not reached critical mass yet because of the exorbitant SMS/MMS fees. Also short codes are not as available and mobile users do not realize they can send a text message to now@mojungle.com.
This will all change.
The blogging applications available at GetJar are based on Java ME and they all communicate via HTTP, so the cost for SMS/MMS is not really an argument. Some of them are very hard to configure, but as the applications are not even downloaded much the reason must be something else.
For pure text blogging it would work with SMS (but not very well), MMS, email, WAP, HTML or Java, provided a service acted gateway.
For photo, video and/or audio blogging you could use email, MMS or Java, of course also via a gateway service.
Carlo,
Thanks for the Rabble mention. I wanted to add that there are a couple of things we are doing with respect to mobilization of your existing conent, or rather, allowing your content to flow freely in either direction.
1. Our bi-directional publication between mobile and web currently suports Blogger, Live Journal, Movable Type, Typepad, Eventful, Upcoming.org, Webshots and Zoto. We have MSN Spaces rolling out later this week.
2. We have been creating Widget type things for our users to display for a while that resyndicates that content onto things like their blog or Myspace page. Examples can be found on my blog at http://doien.blogspot.com and on artist sites like The Plain White Ts here http://www.myspace.com/plainwhitets . We are sending out the Flash version this week to make the content dynamic.
3. We rolled out the WAP read only piece a couple of weeks ago that let’s any of our users share their content through a WAP version. For example my version is at wap.rabble.com/Derrick . Here you can see my Rabble posts, My posts from Blogger, and the Events I added via Eventful and Upcoming.
More to come as we roll out our 2.0 client and WAP infrastructure in the very near future. To us, your mobile content and your web content are equally important but in different contexts. We hope we are bringing the right pieces of both to our users.
-Derrick (Intercasting Corp. makers of Rabble)
After having done some experimentation in this space (http://www.where.com), I’d say there are several things that can slow these types of services from reaching the mainstream:
1) Mobile data plans can be expensive and complex.
2) Phone interfaces for sending photos/videos to an email address can be cumbersome; 10 taps before entering the destination email address is not uncommon.
3) Typical web marketing techniques rarely succeed in getting people to pick up their phones and try something new (it’s much easier to get a mobile user’s attention when they’re bored and offline).
For a reference point on this market, a site like PhotoBucket represents 2% of all US Internet traffic, and yet is only doing 34,000 mobile uploads a day.
The good news is that the mobile space continues to grow and the technology is in place to put our mobile photos and videos online and share with others.
In newer phones I’ve found that it’s easy (at least much easier than before) to take a photo, record video or voice and send that as an MMS or e-mail, so some aspects of phone use have been improved considerably, and there’s no real reason for making a Java application for sending audio, photos or videos to blogs and social networks any longer, which is quite beneficial to service providers: no need to tackle the “fragmentation hell” of Java, and simply no need to do anything on the phone side at all. This is of course provided that e-mail or MMS have been configured properly beforehand.
You can upload photos and videos to mojungle using ShoZu. Just tried it - works great!
I totally agree with your statements that there is not only a need but an opportunity for deep mobile integration into social networking and media sharing web sites. There are some great web sites and mobile only applications, but none out there that are focusing on delivering an integrated approach to both platforms.
For those who are interested, here’s how to set up mojungle as a ShoZu destination - http://forum.shozu.com/showthread.php?tid=93&pid=357#pid357.
I guess I should also respond to Anders point that “there’s no real reason for making a Java application for sending audio, photos or videos to blogs…any longer”.
In a way, I agree - handset manufacturers have made messaging pretty easy these days. But there are still some reasons to install an app (Symbian, Microsoft, Java, BREW…). In the case of ShoZu, for example…
- Uploads are even easier (one-click)
- 50% less data than wireless email (therefore cheaper)
- Full quality images and videos (unlike MMS) - currently ShoZu has a limit of 4 MB, but we’re being quite conservative and will probably raise this in future
- Resume uploads automatically from point of failure after any interruptions (saves hassle and data costs)
- Add or edit tags, titles and descriptions from your phone - before or after upload
- Tells you when upload is complete
- Read and reply to comments from your phone
- Send or post your photo / video to as many destinations as you like, on as many occasions as you like, but only pay for one upload over the air.
Hope that’s helpful. I don’t mean to argue against Anders, just to point out why some users (especially those who do a lot of mobile blogging) find client apps useful.
Cheers
Andy
[...] So it looks like more people are starting to use MMS, or are at least trying it. One factor that could be driving this is a change in pricing — most of the major US carriers now price all messages the same, if users buy them in bundles or buy an unlimited plan. I haven’t been able to figure out if there’s some activity creating a large mass of heavy users (like moblogging could do), and I’ve checked with my crack youth focus group to see if there’s something the kids are doing that I’m missing out on, but that’s drawn a blank as well. So what gives? Any ideas? [...]
Thanks Andy for your comments and that you were courteous :).
The snippet I included here is actually part of a longer note about issues with Blogger Mobile, that also mentions Java vs e-mail/MMS yet in a slightly different context:
http://www.abiro.com/news/2006/07/google-blogger-as-showcase-for-mobile.html
I agree with most of your comments. I’m a Java ME developer, so I have some knowledge of the pros and cons. I though wrote a longer note with comments on two of them. In short:
- one-click - finding and starting a Java application is not one-click etc (the usual stuff…)
- costs - MMS is actually competitive to data in some countries, and can increasingly be so due to competition
But I don’t think it’s of interest to the broader audience. If you want the info you can let me know via my feedback form. No strings attached.
Cheers,
Anders Borg
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