ShoZu: Subscribe to friends' Flickr photos on your phone

A whole heap of Web 2.0 companies are competing for recognition of their phone-to-Web and Web-to-phone services. Most are mainly media storage, sharing, or manipulation companies like Thumbplay and 3Guppies, that have added a proprietary push-to-phone service to make their brand do more. ShoZu, a 2007 Webware 100 winner, is one of the few I've seen whose actual goal is to push content to your phone and from it, using as many partner services as they possibly can.

Today ShoZu announced a partnership with Flickr that lets users subscribe to friends' individual media feeds. A lot has changed since Webware.com's previous coverage, including greater handset support that made it possible to get a really thorough hands-on evaluation. While the Flickr photostreaming feed is one small part of the multimedia volley you can engage in with ShoZu, it hints at greater mobile powers to come.

I ShoZu my photos, you show me yours.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Here's how you do it. Install the ShoZu app and open it. ShoZu is divided into two functions--pushing media from your phone and siphoning media into it. In Share-It, click into the destinations menu and click or tap the soft key to pull up the Options. From there you can browse the media partners and add Flickr as a destination. Adding your password comes next, and if there's a hang-up, you can verify your account by adding Flickr at ShoZu.com. Once enabled, you'll be able to publish photos from your camera to Flickr, or Facebook, or 22 other outlets.

Next, click into the other menu, ZuCasts. Click again to "Get ZuCasts" and scroll until you see Flickr. Your contacts have been populated and you can go through and subscribe to their feeds at will. ShoZu's settings let you control photo quality and download frequency among other things, to mitigate your phone bills if you've got a less-than-generous data plan. Otherwise, you're ready to keep up with pals by swapping and commenting on Flickr photos.

ShoZu is a neat service that withstood my rigorous testing, though some of its organization occasionally bewildered. More big announcements are on the way with ShoZu's ease of use, CEO Mark Bole hinted, which will expand ShoZu's publishing network and device accessibility even more.

[ShoZu Jambo]

Thanks for the ShoZu review!

Thanks for this awesome review! Great to see you have ShoZu all up and running on your phone and taking advantage of the latest features.

We are proud to be taking our social media platform to the next level and opening the floodgates to a whole new world of social networking. Now that we have developed the framework, who knows what the limits are ;-)

Stay tuned, we have some more big announcements coming over the next couple of months.

Best,
Jambo (ShoZu)

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