Thursday, May 08, 2008

Communi-Content aggregation

Shozu added more high profile end destination partners this week including twitter (& twitpic), photobucket and seesmic.

The microblogging end-destinations such as twitter are an obvious addition (text upload and comment/replies synching back to the phone) and indicates Shozu is heading towards becoming more of a mobile social service rather than just a pure uploading app to web end destination sites.

Flickr comment downloading on your uploaded flickr photos have been supported for a while and now you can receive yours and your friends timeline tweets. Hopefully geotagging text/status updates will be enabled if the end destinations supports it too, (like jaiku).

As I blathered on previously, there seems to be a race on to own communi-content aggregation and there's been a few moves in this area lately. Lifestream.fm was recently bought, Facebook apparently is failing, Ovi is expanding it's reach, FriendFeed continues to be the current web 2.0 darling and other services head towards aggregating all of your content and communication such as the services mentioned here (there's lots more).

Zyb, whilst originally a different proposition from Shozu, is related because it is now evolving from just contact and pim synching service to add in lifestreaming and aggregation. (see picture below). Shozu used to have mobile contact /address book synching but dropped it in the latest client version.


Jaiku, whilst being a micro-blogging end destination in itself, also used the mobile phone address book (in the client based version) to include presence and added the ability to import other web 2.0 service updates (Facebook, twitter etc..).

It looks to me like these types of services are converging and it will be interesting to see which ones go on to be the most successful, those based around the personal/social network, aggregating destinations (for content and/or communications), a hybrid of both or none of the above.

For me, those that include and integrate the mobile phone address book (and synch to the web) are the most interesting. After all the mobile address book/contacts the ultimate personal social network isn't it?

Comparing Zyb's new mobile enhanced contact/address book and Dashwire will be a blog post for a future date.