A Day in Paradise

I was first introduced to Pikchur while at Barcamp Miami, I met a couple of developers and talked to them about the project.

Pikchur is a multi-platform mobile photo sharing platform. Think of twitpics on steroids with a good design and some awesomeness sprinkled in for good measure. It is really the simplest way to share pictures on the go (yes, that is from the front page).

I signed up for a Pikchur account – grabbed the name aaron (to add to my flickr and linkedin collection) but since my trusty Blackberry 8700 (aka “The Calculator”) did not have a camera, I did not have any need for a mobile photo sharing platform.

Skip ahead a month – I just got the new Blackberry 8900 which has a fantastic 3.2 megapixel camera. I was playing with Twitter, Twitpix and a couple other tools when I pulled up Pikchur again.

I’ve been playing with Pikchur now for a couple of days and love it.

At its core, Pikchur gives you the ability to upload images from a mobile device, this can either be done through a web, email or mms interface. Once your picture (or pikchur) has been uploaded, there is a lot that happens.

Integration with other platforms.

Pikchur is integration at its finest. In fact the integration with other platforms is so seamlessly integrated into Pikchur that you don’t even need to have a Pikchur ID, but can log in using the credentials of any of the sites that Pikchur integrates with. Each connection is done through the individual platform API which makes the integration simple (and secure).

As soon as I logged in, I added my Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and Flickr accounts to Pikchur. I then sent a picture from my phone to the Pikchur email address and it was sent to all the platforms.

That was pretty impressive, but the Pikchur team took it one step further. Any comments that are made by pikchur users are also posted to the other platforms. This means that if I comment on an image in pikchur, then my flickr identity will also comment on the picture in flickr and if I’ve chosen to link up my Twitter account, an @reply will be sent as well. VERY cool.

Other Goodies
Now you’re probably wondering if it’s really that great an idea to automatically send all your pictures to all your different social networking platforms. The Pikchur team thought of that and came up with a simple yet effective way to turn off posting specific images to platforms.

If I am sending an email update and I want Pikchur to post an image to Twitter but not facebook then I will attach the image, add my subject line and then add the following tag to my email body.

+tw+ -fb-

Using the same “trigger” concept you can post an images into a “PikBoxes” tagged as “fun” using this format:

+fun+

Geotagging

By default Pikchur will read the geo data from your image and tag the images with the information. The homepage will show a google map with call-outs from locations where images are being taken in real time.

If your mobile device does not have GPS capability, you can manually add your data by appending the address to the subject line like this example:

Palm beach boat show * royal park bridge, 33401 *

There is still a lot of work to do

Despite my gushing over the sweet platform that is Pikchur, it is still very much a geeky toy and does not feel like it has received the UI attention that a powerful platform like this needs.

The social networking aspects of this platform are nice, however you can’t do something as simple as viewing the most recent photos of all your friends. You can’t flip back and forth between images in a photo set. This is my BIGGEST issue and there is a lot of pageviews which they are not getting because a user has no easy way to browse a photostream.

Also I would love to be able to do simple things like rotating an image after I uploaded it.

In the facebook integration, I would like to be able to have the option to change my status to the subject of the image with a link to the Pikchur page. Maybe as a “premium feature” I’d like to be able to post the full sized image to to Facebook (I’ll pay for that).

I think there is an issue when you combine triggers and email sigs. I’ll test that out later.

Conclusion

Having said all that I am LOVING Pikchur and I encourage as many people as possible to sign up to Pikchur and of course view my incredibly awesome photostream