Pickle is a new photo and video sharing service that emphasizes email and phone submissions and shared project pages. Created by an Arlington based company called Incando, Pickle is based on the premise that email is the dominant way that multimedia is shared and thus should be the basis of media sharing systems. Despite some early beta bugs, the usability looks good and I really like the idea of encouraging people other than an account creator to share photos and videos on a project page.
Like too many media sharing services, I don’t see a way to easily export all my media I’ve uploaded to Pickle. As we saw last week, that’s a real problem.
The best thing about Pickle is the ability to easily create an email address that you or other people can mail photos and video to and have the attachments appear on a special project page. Sports, parties, political events – it looks easy to document public events with Pickle and that’s cool. Here’s my Picklebox test page.) The idea is that I can set up a page just for one event, that page will have its own email address and privacy settings and thus control over collaboration is more granular than is the case in other systems.
The service also offers what they call Picklemails, emails you can send to people with your images and video compressed to they don’t annoy recipients. The admin page is set up to look like an email inbox so that people will feel comfortable using it.
It’s really a well produced system, with features like commenting, slide shows, etc. I can see it catching on with the e-mail crowd – and that’s most of the online world still.
The price point is steep, the site says $50 per year for standard upload, unlimited download and storage, but the company is offering $20 subscriptions to the first 25,000 beta testers. There is also a free level of service that comes with 200 mb monthly upload limit, instead of the 2 GB limit of the paid service.
Though things are changing, it is still relatively uncommon for one service to offer both photo and video sharing. That, combined with the good usability of Pickle and its options for collaboration make me think this is a service with good prospects.
Hat tip to Orli Yakuel for this one.
http://www.Podcastpickle.com welcomes another pickle to the big barrell
I’m digging it, del.icio.us’ing it, furling it, sphereing it, farking it blah blah i just don’t feel like pickling it.
ahh…heck why not.
Pickle is not a bad name for a website but I really don’t understand the difference between this and other photo/video sharing websites. Only thing I see here is that now I will have a pickle email address to add to my collection of ten thousand other email addresses that I already have.
Dots, the primary difference is the ability to create a unique email adress that people can send files to so that those files appear on a particular project page, or Picklebox.
Pickle is a really really bad name – i just don’t see any room for personal content sharing service like this, especially at $50. The email feature is quite useful but in reality how often are you going to use it? And how long until Flickr etc adds it
Tommy, Flickr already supports upload by email but I think it’s oriented quite differently than Pickles unique emails for unique pages that can be contributed to by anyone with the email address for that page. Pickle is also different in that it supports both images and video. I think there is some important differentiation here and hopefully a premium account at Pickle won’t really cost $50/year. Though for video plus photos perhaps that’s not so unfair.
I don’t think the subscription model will work for a photo sharing site (since you could argue that the market is already saturated). I would lean towards a free service, creating revenue through ads, picture orders (see Ofoto aka Kodak EasyShare), and personalized gifts (albums, mugs, etc.)
Many people in rural America like Idaho Falls need simple to use tools like this, but there has to be a free trial or free limited use available for them to try it out. I
would suggest limited – mb accounts for free before this could be recommended at http://www.idahofallz.com
Pickle free accounts are limited to 7 boxes (after the first year promotion) and the upload quotas are also limited to 75Mb/month, 10Mb/file. The paid account is too expensive (double than Flickr).
I’ve actually been using this for a couple of weeks now and really like it. I still prefer flickr for hosting all of my photos, but for a quick email blast of a group of shots, pickle works great!!!
I’ll sell you a pickle for a nickle.
Honestly… the shine is wearing off this type of interaction and media for me. One could imagine that every thing under the sun could be neatly divided into digital image, digital movie, digital sound, text – add tabs and stir.
Every site on the web either seems to be the above, or discuss the above and other sites that are the above.
I might be prematurely bored, but this has got to wear thin at some point for the general public.
Snooping around Pickle I came across what appears to be their development version of the site. Interesting to see where it came from. Immediatly encourages me to stay away.
http://www.leve...um=0&menu=0
Isn’t the whole point of 2.0 that we don’t want to ‘pickle it’? Pickling means preserving – the opposite of what we are all about.
Ivan
“I’m digging it, del.icio.us’ing it, furling it, sphereing it, farking it blah blah i just don’t feel like pickling it.”
lmao ditto. I just can’t get past the smiling pickle mascot. Maybe if the site took a more professional approach.
I think they should’ve used PickleJars instead of PickleBoxes. Who keeps their pickles in a box?
I sometimes put my pickle in a box : 0
Looks like Tech Crunch killed the server
Sites down here
bo-ring
how could they have gotten this domain name??? gay porn purveyers must be pissed!
i’ve tried a few times to email a video clip from my mobile phone to my pickle account…and cannot get it to work. is anyone else experiencing similar issues? i want to make sure its not user error
pickle support is great. i posted comment 21 this morning and someone from pickle proactively emailed me regarding my issue. i still hope its not user error.
Hey tsutaoka (21), it’s definitely not user error. Though we support one of the widest arrays of file formats available on any site (.gif, .jpg, .avi, .wmv, .mov, .qtl, .mpg, .3g2, and .3gp), we unfortunately don’t support .mp4 at this point – which is the format your mobile phone is creating. Support for .mp4 will be coming soon. Thanks for using Pickle!
hi,
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I would wonder if it is too “family driven”. It seems that the most notable features are for a group of people, or a family or friends or so. That means it would not generate something like a web 2.0 site would have – a community.
Another thing, it seems that that frontpage picture on the site is a photo of Hong Kong’s sea coast, is it?