Umundo is a new service that allows users to share photos and video captured on mobile phones without the need to set up an account. By entering a phone number or email, anyone can subscribe to a feed in a number of online readers or in iTunes. Code is also available to display video on MySpace pages.
Oliver over at MobileCrunch wrote a positive review of Umundo last night and compares it to another system called Abazab, but I have some concerns about Umundo myself.
The system is very easy to use and seems unique in its support for uploading both photos and video by phone. Unfortunately the ease of use comes at a serious cost in functionality.
Since there are no accounts required there’s no option to remove single images or videos from your feed. The entire feed can be deleted at once, but in the fast paced world of embarrassing social blunders and inappropriate teenage behavior that MySpace covers it seems important to have the option of deleting a single photo. If there was a simple account page available this and other issues could be easily solved.
Widespread adoption is also likely to be mitigated by the fact that you can’t view photos in iTunes or MySpace. According to the FAQ only video is supported in those systems. There are certainly ways to offer code to display images in a feed directly on an HTML page. Given how widespread iTunes use is it would make sense to me to offer images as album art. The system is interesting because it offers both photo and video support, but the photo support seems like it was an afterthought. That’s too bad, as I can imagine photos could be integrated better with MySpace and this could get a lot of use.
Feed subscriptions are displayed as “Clip(s) from 2134453567 headlines” in your feed reader and items are title links. A title field for the feed itself would be a logical thing to include. I’m not sure how compelling most MyYahoo users, for example, would find a box on their page with a string of numbers above a list of one line text links.
Hexlet LLC, the company behind Umundo also owns RSSBazaar, a feed publishing service used to deliver content like Umundo images and video. I imagine this means that the company is capable of making some changes to the feed delivery details.
Umundo may become a desirable tool if better functionality develops, but for now I think the ease of use comes at too high a cost.
Interesting twist. With the exposion of camera phones and video enabled phones there are going to be more and more sites in this space. I like the share capability to get the photos into other sites, that is definitely key. But they need to offer the user more control. Our where.com product is similar in that you can send pix and video to go@where without ever registering but if you do go to where.com and register you can then delete and manage photos more easily. Another twist with where that has been popular is we allow users to register a sub-domain (E.g. jon.where.com) and then let people send pix and video to jon@where.com. Those can be view on WHERE or pulled via XML so you can aggregate pix and video into a group from many phones.
Hit submit too soon without the API docs…The http://www.where.com API is available at http://www.where.com/api
Marshall, I don’t know how easy it would be for them to offer photo feedss for iTunes. You can’t just subscribe to album art, iTunes won’t allow it. That’s why we have iPhoto’s Photostream subscriptions. I guess if they created a Photostream, people could subscribe to it in iPhoto on Mac OS X and put the same feed into a normal feed reader like Thunderbird on Windows. I’ve tried subscribing to Photostreams without iPhoto and it works fine, it’s just an advantage to have the program. But you’re totally right about iTunes having widespread usage. I just wonder how much content we can cram into one program.
Jon, interesting service you’ve got. I like the banner a lot.
PS: Digg this story here: Umundo makes mobile photo and video sharing easy
Actually Umundo support Photocasts. The site just do not advertize this feature. Follow these complex and geeky steps to see photos from your mobile in iPhoto via Umundo:
1. Send photo from your mobile to video@umundo.com
2. Go to http://www.umundo.com and type your phone number
3. View page source and find in it URL of RSS feed: in is gonna be in HEAD section, under LINK element with type=”application/rss+xml”. Copy the URL into clipboard.
4. Start iPhoto (you need new one, from iLife 6, which supports Photocasting)
5. In File Meny select “Subscribe to Photocast”
6. Paste URL and press enter
Your are done! Now all photographs sent from your mobile phone to umundo will appear in your iPhoto automagically.
Enjoy!
I am sure pretty soon this process will be simplified to one click by diligent and hard working Umundo developers (us).
Vadim