Jason Pearce

Capturing photos and videos via a mobile phone is easy. Posting those files online from a mobile phone, however, is often tedious. In most cases you would email or MMS photos individually to Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook.

I was looking for a way to upload multiple images and videos from my mobile phone in a batch. I found two solutions for my Windows Mobile 6 device.

Yahoo! Go

Flickr is a Yahoo-owned property, so I thought I’d first see if I can find a tool they developed. I found and tested Yahoo! Go 2.0 (the 3.0 beta was not yet compatible with my Samsung SCH-i760).

Yahoo! Go 2.0 includes an interface for Flickr, among other things like your Yahoo! calendar, email, search, news, maps, and weather. It’s simple and works great on a mobile phone. It permits you to select multiple images to upload, but no more than six at a time. This was close to my solution, but it limited me to six photos at a time and worked only with Flickr.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 Flickr Tour

The Flickr section of Yahoo! Go 2.0 features an easy “Upload photos” section.

Photos are available in groups of six (no videos). Here I select two of the six photos I wish to upload.

ShoZu

Where Yahoo! Go falls short, ShoZu excels — and then some. Not only does ShoZu support batch uploading of photos or videos to Flickr (just photos), YouTube (just video), and Facebook (just photos); it also interacts with Blogger, Box, Cellfish, Kodak Easyshare Gallery, LiveJournal, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, and many more sites I’ve never heard of (see complete list).

With great flexibility, ShoZu also lets up upload to any email address or FTP account. And to take it one step further, ShoZu offers what it calls multiple destination uploading, which is a fancy way of saying it will automatically carbon copy (cc) up to 10 other sites (or FTP accounts, or email addresses, etc.) with the photos or videos you upload.

What this means is that when I use ShoZu to upload a batch of 20 photos to my Flickr account, I can ask it to also post those same 20 photos to my Facebook account, my Picassa Web Album, and store a copy in my FTP account for good measure. It’s a true one-to-many FTP-like solution that resides on my mobile. I don’t even know of a desktop client that does that.

ShoZu Tour

Here I have configured ShoZu to recognize three of my destination accounts: Flickr, YouTube, and a personal FTP site. My carbon copy sites are configured via their website and are not available via their mobile client.

Similar to Yahoo! Go, you may select multiple photos, but you have to first enable the ability to mark multiple images or videos.

Here I select two images to upload, but I may select all of them if I would like.

I may also select videos. Here I select two out of three videos I wish to upload to YouTube. Too bad they don’t offer a thumbnail to help me determine my selections.

I may even view the status of my uploads, which continue to run in the background.

For example, if I wanted to add a few more images to the upload queue, I may easily do so.

When ShoZu finished uploading, I found my photos on Flickr (primary site), Picasa (cc site), and Facebook (another cc site); and my videos on YouTube. My FTP site (also a cc site) had all of my photos and videos. Way cool!

ShoZu Shortcomings

In many regards, ShoZu exceeds my expectations. But now I’m hooked and I want more. Here are a few shortcomings or opportunities ShoZu’s developers should address.

1. Flickr Video: Flickr now supports both video and photos. ShoZu needs to catch up and permit users to also send Flickr videos their way.
2. 10 megabyte per file limitation: While photos won’t hit the 10 MB ceiling, videos most certainly may. With 1 GB memory cards common-place, they should bump this limit up to 150 MB or more.
3. Support more phones: While they already support many phones, my Samsung SCH-i760 Windows Mobile 6 is unsupported. I took a guess and tried their software for another phone, which (mostly) worked.
4. Toggle CC Feature: Sometimes, I won’t want to send a photo or video to many locations. Provide your uses a way to toggle the carbon copy feature on or off. Better yet, let them multi-select the sites during each upload, much the same way they can multi-select which images they’ll upload in a batch.
5. Develop a desktop multi-file upload interface: Although ShoZu offers an upload tool for the desktop user, it uploads only one image at a time. If they developed an AJAX interface similar to Flickr and YouTube’s multi-file, browser-based upload tools, they would gain many more users.

Today Google released an IMAP interface to Gmail. Once you enable IMAP via Settings in your Gmail account, you then need to configure your client to access Gmail via the new IMAP interface.

Since I’ve never been able to figure out how to get the Gmail for mobile application to run on my Windows Pocket PC (because I can’t find a J2ME Java client), adding IMAP now gives me the ability to ditch their Gmail for mobile browser interface and instead use the built-in Messaging client on my phone, which is also known as Outlook Mobile.

And since Google’s Help Center on the “Supported IMAP Client List” didn’t include instructions on how to set up a Windows Mobile Pocket PC, I thought I’d create a brief tutorial. All steps are made within the Messaging client (Start > Messaging).

Step 1: Menu > Tools > New Account

Step 2: Enter your full Gmail email address

Step 3: Wait or skip the Auto Configuration

Step 4: Enter name, username (sans @gmail.com), password

Step 5: Select IMAP4 and name the account

Step 6: Incoming is imap.gmail.com, Outgoing is smtp.gmail.com

Step 7: In Options, set Connection frequency

Step 8: Require SSL and Authentication are necessary

Step 9: Headers Only make things quick

Step 10: Menu > Switch Accounts & Menu > Send/Receive to test

Today was an unwanted day of tinkering with and explaining spam defenses. Spam comes in many formats. The two that affect me the most are email spam and comment spam.

Email Spam

At the office, I have many layers of spam defenses. One of those layers are DNSBLs. DNS Stuff maintains a list of roughly 275 block lists that are used to publish lists of IP addresses linked to spamming.

When a message is sent to a @lambdachi.org address, our server first asks 10 of these 275 DNSBLs if they consider the sending computer is recently a source of spam. If so, the message gets blocked before ever reaching the next level of spam filtering.

Up until the last few weeks, the DNSBLs Lambda Chi Alpha uses have done wonders in keeping the bad guys at bay. But recently, our IT department has received an increase of staff and members reporting their frustrations of being blocked (called false positives).

Educating our members and our staff about why they might get blocked has led to this posting earlier this week, along with taking the time to respond to each user’s concerns.

My concern is that as spammers increase their use of botnets (a collection of compromised computers spewing out spam), DNSBLs will lose their effectiveness because they will end up blocking legitimate users.

The consumer Internet service providers like Comcast, Bellsouth, and Earthlink provide services for thousands of computers they have little control over. When just one of their customer’s computers becomes infected by a botnet and starts spewing out spam, the DNSBLs block the ISPs IP address, which ends up blocking the rest of their clients from accessing our mail server.

The more DNSBLs block legitimate users, the less reliable they become. Sure, they keep the spammers at bay but at the cost of blocking good guys too. If the consumer ISPs did a better job of cleaning up their own networks and blocking their customers who appear to be infected by a botnet, then we’d all be better off.

Comment Spam

Last week, “whoo” of village-idiot.org released a WordPress plugin called wp-spamhaus. Comment spam is just as big of a problem as email spam. In the past 12 months, I’ve removed more than 15,000 unwanted comments from this site alone.

Whoo’s plugin first checks Spamhaus, a leading DNSBL provider, if the IP address of the computer requesting access to a website is listed as a source of spam. Instead of blocking email spam, her plugin migrates the block to website access. If the spammer can’t view your website, they can’t leave behind comment spam.

It’s another nice layer to add to comment spam defenses, but may also fall plague to the botnets and false positives.

Users don’t like it when their email gets blocked or if they can’t access a website. It doesn’t matter if their own computer is compromised and infected with a botnet, or if their neighbor’s computer is, they don’t understand and may even take it personal.

The saddest thing about botnets and DNSBLs is that the machines spammers use to attack your network are the very same machines your users use to access your network. By blocking the bad guys, you also keep out the good.

I received a text message today from Yahoo’s Mixd service saying their “pilot study will end on Feb 25th and that the service will no longer be available.”

Bummer, for Mixd proved to be very useful last month when 20 Lambda Chi Alpha staff members were stranded in various airports in a effort to get to San Antonio for a conference. Texas was experiencing heavy flight delays due to an ice storm. Mixd helped us easily notify everyone with updated information on our estimated arrival times.

Mixd operated much like an email listserv, but was designed for cell phones. Users would simply SMS (text message) a number, and all members who subscribed to that number received your text message. That way, a single text message would reach all 20 staff members.

Here’s what Mixd says about its closing:

Mixd is taking a break

Thanks for being a part of the Mixd pilot study. On February 25th, we’ll end the pilot and the service will no longer be available. Please be sure to download any pictures you want to save before February 25th.

I imagine that some of Mixd’s services will be rolled into Yahoo! Mobile. In the meantime, similar cell phone SMS services such as Dodgeball, Socialight, and Twitter will have to fill Mixd’s absence.

I enjoyed this video, which nicely illustrates the advancements of user-generated content (Web 2.0) technologies.