shozu.com

In a nutshell, Shozu extends your camera phone's capabilities to save images or video directly to your favorite blogging and picture sharing sites. It'll send stuff you've previously saved on your phone, or it'll send something you just captured. They're currently able to send to blip.tv, buzznet, any email address, flickr, an ftp account, blogger, kodak, dada.net, livejournal, metaweblog, moblog.uk, picassa, pikeo, qipit, scoopt, textamerica, typepad, vox, webshots, wordpress and youtube. They don't seem to support social networking sites yet, like myspace, facebook, xanga and the like.

In short, it works just fine. Once configured, it's just a couple clicks on the phone to send your pictures and video to any site you like. Every new picture or video you make, it pops up a menu and offers to send it to your configured sites. There's even an automatic CC (as in carbon copy) function to always upload images to the sites you configure.

To me, though, it doesn't add much value. I've already got entries for flickr, radar, rabble, livejournal and others in my phone's contact list, so it's the same number of clicks for me to send pictures to any of those sites. Plus, shozu adds their own logo to every post they make on your behalf, and it's a pretty big one. MMS or emailing my pictures into a sharing site directly doesn't add anyone's logo to my posts.

The other nuisance is that I can no longer take several pictures in a row on this N75. After every picture, it tells me to open the flip phone so I can tell it whether or not I want to send the image to one of my configured sites.

For some folks, maybe road-warriors (claims adjusters?) or maybe teens or maybe grampa, this might be a really useful utility. Plus it's the only one I've seen that lets me upload to an ftp site, which could be turned into a very interesting sort of "webcam" application, showing my latest cameraphone picture on a web page, up to the minute. But for me, I'll be sticking to direct upload with the email/MMS gateways kept in my contact list.

Nice features; maybe they'll get bought for parts.