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

Vote for Twango in the Mashable Social Networking Awards

Totally addicted to Twango? Vote for us in Mashable's social networking awards!

Update 12-27-2006: The contest is closed, but you can still vote to express that you like Twango! Mashable is monitoring the votes that come in after the deadline for fun.

Click the link below:

Photocasting, hi-quality audio for videos, audio twidget

Photocasting. In addition to Podcasting audio and video, Twango now offers Photocasting to Mac users via iPhoto. Click the button at the bottom of any channel, and your iPhoto application will create a Photocast and even sync Twango photos to your iPod. Find out how.

New audio twidget. Play your Twango audio clips in your blog or website. Just copy/paste the Embed code provided on the right side of any audio media page. You'll get an audio player like this:

And speaking of audio, we've cranked up the quality of audio in our video playback so videos with stereo music and large frequency ranges sound great.

Twango now offers professional quality prints and photo gifts!

We have partnered with Backprint to bring high quality photo printing at competitive prices to anyone using Twango. Upload your photos and order prints or photo gifts like holiday cards, mugs, and buttons. Ship them to yourself or to your friends as gifts - 'tis the season.
Here's how:

1. From any individual photo page, choose the new "Order prints, gifts" command



2. Select from 9 different print sizes ranging from wallet size to posters (as recommended for your photo's resolution). You can also select photo gifts like holiday cards, mouse pads and magnets.


3. Continue shopping for other photos or checkout with your credit card. Get prints at your own door or send them as gifts to your friends.

Custom channel sorting, rich comment formatting, and more ways to explore and share your media

One of the commonly-requested features has been custom-sorting media in your channels. Well with yesterday's site update, now you can. In any of your own channels, just click on a media thumbnail (or a multiple selection of thumbnails) and drag it to a new desired position in the channel. As you drag your item(s), you'll notice a moving insertion point to help guide you. Once you've hand sorted your channel you'll notice the timeline will disappear (since the channel is no longer time-sorted) and the sort box on the right will reflect your custom sort (eg. "johnd's sort"). You can always switch between the standard time sorts and your last custom sort using this dropdown control. Give it a try. It's perfect for custom sorting photos for slideshows!

For you more verbose-types, we've bumped the character limit for media descriptions from 320 to 2000 max characters. And you can do more in those longer description fields: insert clickable urls and format your media text the way you want.

Notice more on the media pages? We're giving more visual examples of other media to explore, like next / previous item in a channel and media from the same location or camera model.

And you'll notice our 2 pimary page actions, share and subscribe, are more visually prominent and easier to find.

Blogging and embedding your media on other pages is also easier now with the "Embed this channel" command (on channel pages) and Embed links control (on media pages). Copy/paste the embedding code to share your media on MySpace, eBay, Blogger, Evite, or virtually any other site that accepts html.

Customizable home page, XMP support, and more

Another month, another prop. We've added two features that we've heard clamoring for: customizable home page ribbons and XMP support. Now, when you're signed in, you can choose whether you want to see the latest photos, videos, audio and other files from your contacts or from people who have shared with you. Don't like seeing media from BobTheJerk? Choose to see the latest media from your contacts and make sure he's not a contact. You can now also choose how many rows of thumbnails you want to see on your home page. You want to see up three rows of thumbnails? Or do you want to hide them all and prevent seeing this on your home page? It's your choice now.

We've also added support for XMP metadata. Adobe's making a big push to standardize the way metadata is stored in JPGs and TIFFs and, if you're using their latest products or software like iView, you'll notice that your metadata has been stored as or converted to XMP. We glean data such as title, description, and keywords and insert them into our database so you don't have to type them in again.

Finally, we've added scenario pages that give a nice overview of what's possible on Twango. Though there are undoubtedly a gazillion different ways to use Twango (the only limit is your imagination!), we illustrate some common scenarios that we've come up with, as well as those that we've heard from our members.

Podcasts, member faces, and rich text

This week's update rolls out some pretty cool new features plus fixes a bunch of little bugs, improves performance, and gives more help text on great ways to use Twango.

Twango is podcastic! Now you can podcast your public channels. Upload iPod-compatible video and audio clips to your public channels and a POD subscription icon will automatically be shown at the bottom of your channel (beside the RSS and XML feeds). Click the POD button and iTunes (Mac or PC) will add it to your podcast subscriptions (here's a sample podcast-enabled channel). Sync with your iPod and now you have Twango on the go!

Check out the new member faces page. Don't see yourself there yet? Be sure to add your profile photo and get your mug up there.

Bold, italicize, size, and link your text with our new rich text ability in our forums. Watch for it soon across other fields throughout the site.

Pretty URLs

In the latest effort to provide a better user experience, Twango now has pretty URLs.   Yes that's right. Whereas before links to pages were ugly beasts with nasty query strings with all sorts of icky parameters, now they are sleek, succinct and to the point.   

For example:
http://www.twango.com/profile.aspx?twangoid=jie

Yuck; what a mouthful.

Whereas now, you simply type:  http://www.twango.com/jie

If this does not simply blow your socks away, here is yet another example. Brace yourselves.
http://www.twango.com/media.aspx?channelname=jie.bellingham&media=jie.10514

Ugly (the URL, not the ladies)

But today, that same URL is now
http://www.twango.com/media/jie.bellingham/jie.10514

Sexy, just like the girls around my arms.    

New navigation and channel subscriptions!

Check out the new browsing-friendly main menu - we're hoping it makes media browsing easier and more fun, especially for first time users. The original member features are now located under the 'home' menu. Have more fun exploring!

Members can now get automatic email alerts when new media or comments are added in your own channels or in channels you 'subscribe' to. Go to any of the channels you frequent, choose the new 'subscribe to this channel' action in the top-right and you'll get immediate email notifications when new stuff is added to that channel You can always change your subscriptions and message settings to control how many alerts you get.

As always, send us your thoughts on these changes and any new suggestions in the forums - see you on Twango!

Yet another feature... private messaging!

Wow, our prop this week was so big, so laden with new features, that I totally forgot to blog about private messaging! Thanks to Jie's hard work, you can now find the "send message" command throughout Twango where you can -- you guessed it -- send that person a private message. Send him a private message and tell him how cool it is.

Linking stuff off of Twango

I almost forgot, we have another feature that we'd like to "tout". On the actions list to the right of the media and channel page are links that allow you to export some code snippets into your blog or website. If you're on a channel page (i.e., don.razr), you will be taken to a channel twidget page, where you can take any of the Flash twidgets and post them to a blog or website (e.g., my blog); for a media page, you'll be directed to a new tab that we've added to the bottom of the page with code snippets to export HTML.

We're working on new twidgets as we speak. If you have any ideas on what types of twidgets you'd like to speak, post your ideas in our forums!