SanFrancisco - (Business Wire), 17 Jul 07 - Shozu today announced the addition of Facebook, the popular social utility website, to its rapidly expanding list of destination options for one-click upload of photos and video clips captured on camera phones. Facebook community members equipped with ShoZu-enabled handsets can now transfer images and related descriptions to their Facebook profiles directly from their phones with the press of a button, eliminating complex navigation sequences or the delay associated with waiting to sync photos to a PC.
In addition, ShoZu has created a Facebook application called “Photo Status” that automatically posts the latest photo sent to a user’s Flickr account via ShoZu to that same user’s Facebook profile, enabling community members to visually track friends’ activities on a near-real-time basis. This new tool for “live” photo sharing leverages Facebook’s strategy to expand from its original identity as an online community for college students to become a one-stop social networking platform supporting third-party geographic, work-related and educational social applications. The site currently has more than 24 million active users, less than half of whom are now in college, and is among the top 20 most-visited online destinations in the world.
Facebook is the latest of more than two dozen Web destination options available with ShoZu’s one-click Share-It image uploading service, giving users a broader choice than any competitive upload technology. The ShoZu client can be downloaded free of charge to more than 200 handset models from www.shozu.com/aboutus. Facebook users can add the Photo Status application at http://apps.facebook.com/photostatus
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Other Share-It destination options include photo/video sharing sites YouTube, Flickr, Google Picasa, Buzznet, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Webshots, Moblog.uk, Dada.net and Pikeo; personal blogging sites Google Blogger, LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, Textamerica, TypePad, Vox and WordPress; citizen-contributed photojournalism sites CNN, the BBC and Scoopt; and any FTP or email address for one-click image upload from ShoZu-enabled camera phones.
"Facebook recently acknowledged the growing importance of mobile uploads to their site by building mobile support into their new Video application. They are also the biggest photo-sharing site on the Web, with more than 6 million photos uploaded every day,” said ShoZu CEO Mark Bole. “By offering Facebook as a destination option for our one-click image upload service, we are ensuring that Facebook members have a fast, easy and low-cost method of updating their Facebook photos and videos wherever they are — whether at a concert, a party, backpacking in Europe or simply going about their daily lives."
ShoZu’s proprietary Share-It technology enables images to be uploaded quietly and reliably in the background at full resolution, leaving users free to make phone calls or take more photos during the image transfer process. Users can add descriptions and tags to individual images from the phone before or after uploading, exchange two-way messages between mobile and Web for sites that support that function, and automatically attach location tags when GPS-enabled handsets are used. The Share-It service is now used in 79 countries.