Location Based Photo Stream in Times Square

This is a perfect example of the fact that we still don’t quite get mobile technology here in the good ‘ol USA. This application, which allows you to submit your images to have them displayed on a giant electronic bulletin board in Times Square is quite cool; yet simply by changing the application or the interface to the application in one of a couple ways, it could have been made not only much, much cooler, but also far more timely and far more relevant.

How? Well for starters, to even view the site you have to have Flash 8. The means no mobile device on the planet can view the site. Why not use an iteration of the software that is compliant with the Flash Lite requirements? You can still stream the images. Still, it seems that if the developers of this application cared about mobile at all they’d have some alternate means of viewing the site instead of leaving you locked up at the “You need Flash 8″ page. How about revolving JPEG images from the stream instead of the live camera? That would still be cool.

This isn’t even the big thing they missed though. It’s that most of people’s “big moments” don’t happen conviently by a PC or coveniently near a digital camera. Mostly , you’ve got a camera phone to capture those special memories. This is what makes an application like Shozu and Flickr so cool - they’re there when you need them.

So why doesn’t “Life Comes At You Fast dot Com” incorporate images uploaded via Shozu? I have no idea. I’ve never spoken with their developers, or seen their technology beyond that which I checked out this morning on FireFox. However, it seems clear that they’re missing a really big opportunity and all because they don’t pay attention to the conventions for developing for the third screen AND because they haven’t thought ahead enough about where people are likely to be when the most important moments of their lives occur.

Perhaps if the developers of LCAYF.com thought this through more carefully they’d get on the horn to the Shozu guys right away. After all , how hard could it be to post pictures to them instead of Flickr? Or Even in Conjunction WITH Flickr? Anyone from Shozu or Flickr care to enlighten us? Or more importantly the guys at LCAYF.com? I’m sure they’d be interested to hear what you have to say.

Tags: photos, moblogging, life, flickr, shozu, newyork, lifecomesatyoufast.com
Categories: Analysis, Location Based Services | Bookmark this post with del.icio.us
1 Comment
In additional to sending to your main photo sharing site, you can now configure ShoZu to be able to upload photos and videos to additional destinations, like personal blogs, other photo/video-sharing services, and email addresses.

LCAYF.com looks like an ideal “Other Destination” (as we call them) for ShoZu, except that the only way to upload photos appears to be via a web form (after filling in lots of personal details). If they accepted uploads via email then ShoZu support would come for free.

Comment by Andy Tiller — May 2, 2006 @ 12:46 pm

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