Promoting its ramped-up service as "two-way mobile social media," ShoZu now allows for YouTube videos to be pushed to handsets.
Taking the concept of push e-mail to a new level, ShoZu today opened its new "two-way" mobile social media service. Instead of pushing e-mail, ShoZu aims to deliver web content through automatic feeds. The company has already closed agreements with YouTube and Flickr, while other significant players will be added later on.
"Social media has been moving from the Web to your pocket, but until now the only practical way to interact with your preferred social network, personal blog or photo or video sharing site from the handset has been to send photos and video clips captured on the phone to the site of your choice," says ShoZu CEO Mark Bole.
Flickr users with a ShoZu-equipped phone can now request that new Flickr photos posted by friends will be sent to their phone immediately after they are published. Users can receive a collective feed of the latest photos from all of their friends as well as individual feeds from specific friends. The content delivery does not interrupt other phone activities, and a popup message on the idle screen notifies of new updates.
Flickr users with the ShoZu application on their phone can also both receive and respond to friends' comments on their own Flickr photo directly from the phone, set the application to automatically add geotags for images captured with a GPS-enabled phone, and have those GPS-tagged photos automatically appear on their Flickr map.
Also new is the ability for ShoZu users to receive YouTube's "Featured," "Mobile" and "Most Views" feeds delivered automatically to the phone. ShoZu will deliver a thumbnail and description of up to 10 clips with each feed, enabling users to click on the videos that interest them to begin streaming from the YouTube site.
For users without unlimited mobile data plans, the new Flickr and YouTube content feed options include cost controls making it possible to set weekly limits on data delivery by megabyte. The ShoZu application itself is free of charge.
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