Roland Tanglao's Weblog

<armchair ceo>
One sentence: “Nokia buy ShoZu”

Fix its memory issues, make it work with absolutely everything (it already works with many many sites) and then make it part of S60
</armchair ceo>

This Twango acquisition makes no sense to me; buy a service nobody uses!?! A ShoZu acquisition makes much more sense; it's a great albeit flawed app (S60 memory issues) that works with all the cool services like flickr, blip.tv, any MetaWeblogAPI enabled blog, etc, etc.

From atmaspheric | endeavors » Blog Archive » Why did Nokia acquire Twango?:

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If Nokia’s tag line is Connecting People, why are they going out of their way to develop new stand-alone services, rather than working with what’s already present and being used by communities globally. They could really just focus enabling the experience from Mobile to web and back. From a user perspective, I would much rather have an application or service that could talk with everything else I use to make it simple for content to go back and forth. This would make it easy for me and easy for my friends to stay in touch. We already know Facebook is working on the connection with the desktop and Jaiku, Facebook and even Plaxo offer ways to have content from other syndicate-able sources appear in your profile, but no one has come up with way to link with your mobile.

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<armchair CEO>

Again, Cognima doesn't need my advice, but I'm going to give it anyway :)

1. Work with Nokia and power users like Ken, Alec and myself (I love ShoZu but if I don't keep the number of photos on my N93 at less than about a 100, after about 200 I have to deactivate and reactivate ShoZu or even worse hard reset the phone; for me 100 photos is less than a week so this is really really annoying) who have had problems with ShoZu and fix the problems!
2. Have an official blog. The ShoZu forums are a mess and hard to follow. I'll settle for full text RSS feeds of all updates to the forum (the current RSS feed only shows the first post and not the replies so it's useless) but really a blog that synthesized the best of the forums plus news would be best. Just having a not very often updated CEO blog is not good enough.
3. Fix the website. It crashes on Mac Firefox randomly
4. Get rid of the silly 4MB limit for videos over WiFi. I am willing to pay about $30 US a year to be able to upload unlimited size videos over WiFi
5. Open source the client. The real secret sauce is the server! This is probably the fastest way to get it running on the iPhone when that becomes possible.

</armchair CEO>

For me, ShoZu is still the best way to flickr photos. I can't imagine not using it in spite of the bugs that Ken, Alec and others have observed. When it works, it is fast and easy and requires 0 clicks (or 2 if you don't automagically upload the photos as they are taken).

I have tried LifeBlog (hate the Windows and PC centric world view (it's about the cloud not the PC!) and the fact that you can only upload 6 photos at a time and the many clicks and how it's quite easy to upload the same photo twice since there's no UI cues for which photos have been uploaded) and the Gallery App on the N93 (again only 6 photos at at time and way too many clicks!)

ShoZu worked much better for me on the Nokia N70 (2237 photos uploaded to flickr via ShoZu) and 7610 (814 photos dating back to October 2005) i.e. S60v2 I think! I have had the same issues as Ken and Alec on all my S60v3 phones i.e. N80i (701 photos; which unfortunately seems to have memory issues in general even with the latest firmware), N73 (178 photos) and N93 (152). The N93 with the latest firmware runs ShoZu better I think.

As a former software developer who currently tests software (Drupal), who as well writes software documentation for Drupal, it annoys me that I can't seem to definitively pin down the reason for the instability of ShoZu on S60v3 nor can I reproduce it a will.

Some guesses (I would call them theories but I am unencumbered by S60 developer knowledge!):

1. Symbian memory allocation/deallocation/leaks
2. S60 memory allocation/deallocation/leaks
3. ShoZu memory allocation/deallocation/leaks
4. Clash with the phone's thumbnail creation code (I have noticed that if you go into the gallery, the thumbnails can take many many seconds to appear and when they don't appear ShoZu doesn't work. Coincidence? Maybe!)
5. The auto upload code hogs the CPU?!?

I am trying to test #5 by turning off auto upload. Currently have 98 photos on my N93. We'll see if the instability starts up again after 120 or so photos as seems to be the pattern. Any help or clues would be appreciated

FROM ShoZu. Not ready for prime-time. -- Alec Saunders .LOG:

QUOTE

Ken Camp has a love / hate relationship with Shozu. I have to say that I concur. It's unbelievably promising, and purports to solve a problem that I have — that Nokia's LifeBlog software doesn't target Wordpress. However, it took hours last night to remove it from the phone. Once installed, it takes over the phone entirely. Hopefully they can solve the problems quickly.

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