Review: Twango offers an elegant, easy media sharing experience
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 17, 2007 at 6:37am
Twango is a relatively new company with a service that I highly recommend. It’s one of the latest additions to the media-sharing space and is founded by former Microsoft employees. But don’t that discourage you. With Twango, you can upload photos, videos, and audio to share with the world. I used the service to provide a daily photo gallery from the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
Randy Kern, one of co-founders, told me that Twango was designed as a “simple, no-fuss site that lets you share photos, videos and audio publicly or privately.” And you can share with anyone, whether he’s a Twango member or not,
Just like YouTube, media is grouped into “channels” and you can organize the content using social filters like “most popular,” “most recent,” “most commented,” “most shared,” etc. There’s tagging, too, and the ability to explore a member’s files using an AJAX-powered timeline. You can also create “podcastable” channels.
Heck, you can even use your iPod as a way to carry around media of your friends as well as more pro-oriented podcasts. What’s more, Twango also supports photocasting. On any channels that holds photos there’s a photocast button that will create photocase in iPhoto. When new photos are added, you’ll see ‘em when you sync with iPhoto. What’s more, Twango preserves metadata in photos, which is handy for users of such apps as Apple’s Aperture or iView.
What’s more, Twango offers an impressive list of “actions” for each photo, audio file or video clip. You can email it to a friend, add it to your favorites, subscribe to the channel, add the user to your contacts and create an instant slideshow. The service also offers a range of options for posting to social networking sites; you can link to the file, create a thumbnail or grab some custom code to embed in your profile page. To make it super easy, they’ve added step-by-step guides for users on MySpace, Xanga, Blogger, eBay and Craigslist, but obviously all the usual suspects are supported. You can’t embed audio files yet, but the folks at Twango say that’s coming soon.
Of course, users also have profile pages, and they’ve had the good sense to give these clean URLs. Your profile page also features Google Maps integration so other users can see where you’re based.
Although a paid plan with premium features will appear in the future, Twango is currently free. Storage is unlimited—if you can put up with 250MB per month upload bandwidth and a 100MB file limit. There are a variety of options for getting your stuff into the system. You can email the files, use the web-based uploader on the Twango site (which is what I did last week)or send images via your cameraphone. And since each channel has its own e-mail address, you can send along email attachments, too.
You can control not only who sees your media, but also what you will allow them to do. For example, you can permit others to simply view your media, or you might allow them to add keywords, comments, and even their own media to your channels.
Twango makes it simple to republish your media. You host your media on Twango, and then with a simple copy/paste you can embed it anywhere on the web – into blogs, discussion groups, websites, MySpace profiles and EBay auctions. You can display your media with slideshows, tickers and more. You can also automatically publish your media in RSS/XML feeds.
There’s more, but you get the picture. My experience with Twango last week was flawless. I defintely intend to use it for upcoming Macsimum photo galleries.
Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10
“Macsimum News” is now offering the “Macsimum MWSF 2007 Coupon Book.” It’s a PDF, downloadable coupon book with discounts, special offers and promotions in conjunction with January’s Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. You can download it here.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
