Ovi Share Blog - Share Your Photos and Videos. Anytime. Anywhere.

We're now Share on Ovi!

We’re baaack!
 
You may have been wondering what in the world we’ve been up to during the last six months since Twango was acquired by Nokia. Frankly, so have we!  Our heads are still spinning from all the changes.  Going from our little basement startup to being a part of a large global company like Nokia has been a real adventure. We’ve grown the team, made some big changes to the service and made a lot of new friends along the way.
 
First, we are now part of Nokia’s new service brand, “Ovi”.  As of Today, the Twango brand will be a fond memory.  We are now Share on Ovi.  As you can see from looking at the site, we’ve moved to a new look and feel that you will see among all the Ovi services as they roll out.  We’ve also streamlined the user interface with simpler navigation, better search options, new ways to explore and an improved help system.
 
Under the covers, we’ve made huge improvements to the service infrastructure, which will allow us to scale to millions of users.  You may not notice these improvements right away, but you’ll experience better performance that doesn’t degrade as more and more people start using the system.
 
And finally, we’ve also spent a lot of time building software that allows Nokia devices to connect to the service.  “Share Online” is a cool application for your Nokia mobile device that allows you to capture photos and videos and upload them to the service directly!  It also allows you to view feeds of media from your contacts and people that are sharing from you, so you can keep in touch with your friends better than ever.  We’ll provide a download link for this software on the Share homepage in the next few days.
 
What you’re seeing today is just a first step on the way to the bold Internet services vision that we at Nokia all share.  More services are on the way, and we will continue to improve the Share service with more great features and better integration with other Nokia services and devices.  We’d love to hear what you think.

We'd love to hear your opinion, so please post your feedback.  We’ll be watching!

--Jim Laurel
Director, Service Development - Nokia

Automated copyright protection

Sharing personal content is at the core of what Twango is all about. From inception, Twango has been focused on our members' sharing needs. We respect the copyrights of amateurs and professionals that post content on the service. One way we can continue to keep the community focused on real media from real people is to make sure copyrighted material is not uploaded without the consent of the owner. Over the next few days we will be implementing an automated system which will identify and remove copyrighted commercial content. You may notice some existing content will no longer be available. Accounts affected will receive an explanatory note in their inbox. This automated system will remain in place to identify copyrighted media and notify members if their uploads are affected. This process will take place in parallel to the upload to ensure upload speeds will not be impacted.

Thanks again for using Twango for your personal media sharing needs.

Twango media on location with Google Earth

Now you can browse and discover Twango media and members geographically. Surf the globe and see Twango photos, videos, and audio on the other side of the earth or in your own backyard. Any geo-tagged item on Twango (e.g. any item with a location value applied) can appear on Google Earth. So remember, apply location tags to your media pages so that you and others can see them on Google Earth.

To view Twango media on Google Earth:

• Install Google Earth (it's free), then:
• View geo-tagged media from the Twango community:
  Click one of these links: most popular media, most popular members (approx location), most recent media, most recent photos, most recent videos, most recent audio
• View geo-tagged media from a particular channel:
  Go to the channel page, click the Subscribe button, then click the icon on the popup.


• View all geo-tagged media from a particular member:
  Go to the member's profile page and click the "view in Google Earth" link near the top.

Clicking the links in the instructions above establishes a KML feed between Twango and Google Earth. The feed automatically keeps Google Earth up to date with the latest geo-tagged items from the particular Twango feeds you've established.

New One-Click File Hosting and Sharing for Nonmembers

Now even nonmembers can upload and share media using Twango. Our newly simplified homepage for nonmembers lets you quickly upload a photo, video, or any number of other files with a single click.

Twango hosts the file and gives you links to embed in your blog or share via email or IM. Of course, if you sign up for a free membership, you can upload larger files, organize those files, get more embedding options, and participate in Twango's activity media sharing community.

Give it a shot - let us know what you think!

Introducing the Webcam Video Widget

Record and share instant videos from your webcam. With our new webcam video widget anyone with a webcam can instantly record videos and share them via email and embed them in blogs. The widget provides a video url and html-code for you to copy and paste into email or your blog. The widget automatically recognizes webcams from popular hardware manufacturers such as Creative, Logitech and Apple and allows users to record a video with a single click.

Add video comments in-place. Other people can add their own webcam video comments right in place. Have your friends leave video greetings for you on your blog. Send video email to a group, and get video replies.

The webcam video widget is free and Twango membership is not required to use the basic features. However, Twango members have the advantage of storing their webcam videos in their Twango account, and managing video comments left by others.

Got a webcam? Give it a try now!

Bookmarking, Share to Mobile, GPS metadata, and more..

A whole raft of new useful features for this week. You can now bookmark your favorite Twango pages on Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, Reddit, FURL, Blinklist, and SPURL. Just click the button of your choice in the 'bookmark bar' at the bottom of the page actions.

Share to mobile. Want to share your photos to someone who's on the go? Click the 'share' command on any media page, then enter a mobile phone number in the addressee box. Twango will send an SMS text message link to the recipient(s) so they can click and view photos directly on their phone, or enter the link later in their web browser to see a full size image.

GPS metadata support. Speaking of phones, does your phone includes GPS location data in its photos? Now Twango will recognize that GPS metadata and render its location as a map beside your photo after you've uploaded it.

Most popular members. Who's the most popular Twango member today? Well our popular member page now breaks out popularity by today, this week, and all time.

Rotate videos. Are you one of those people who insists on holding your video camera in the vertical position?!? (Hey, we've all done it.) Well it's time to give your friends' neck a, er, break. Click the "rotate arrows" beneath your video to make it upright! Who said videos had to be horizontal?

Twango Mobile Site Launches!

Now you can enjoy your Twango media on the go. We're very excited to officially release our mobile site: mobile.twango.com.

Anyone can access the site, view media and share it to anyone via an email address or mobile phone number.

Members can share their own media as well as enter comments and send private messages.

Using Twango's unique email upload features, members can upload media to Twango without any special software.

Give it try now by pointing your mobile phone browser at mobile.twango.com.

Twango has moved to greener pastures

We did done it. We moved our servers to a new colo last night. It was a multi-pronged endeavor that took us several hours to accomplish. We're in the wee hours of the morning now and (this author at least) is near passing out from a mixture of exhaustion and too much caffeine. But it looks like the move was successful, all the pieces seem to be communicating well and all the pages loading fine.

There is actually one little snafu that we've encountered, though. It looks like we're having a wee bit of a problem with the multi drag-drop uploader. If you try to upload using this method, you will be redirected to the basic upload. We will be working our hardest to get the multi drag-drop uploader back up and running and will update this here blog as soon as it's done.

Cheers, you all. And good night.

Twango will be down tonight as we move to our bigger, better datacenter.

Twango is getting supersized. To keep up with the growing appetite for Twango media, the site will be temporarily down as we upgrade our servers and move to a bigger datacenter tonight: 12 midnight to 6am Pacific (0800-1400 GMT). Check back here for status updates.

Twango voted one of the top Social Networks of 2006!

Thanks to all of you who voted for Twango in Mashable's Social Networking Awards contest. Your votes helped Twango win the Photo Sharing Site category. Now, I know you're wondering why we weren't in the video sharing category as well. Who knows? We were nominated, but Mashable chose not to include us. Maybe they were worried that we'd sweep that category too!

Thanks again for your help and Happy Holidays from your friends here at Twango!