Today we’re launching our new web uploader.
It is the first section we’re launching with our new look and feel!

We gathered a lot of feedback about that page by users all around the world and added some nice options.Webcam

You can directly take pictures with your webcam as of now, nice for your daily mugshot or participation in contests or memes!

Multi uploader

We already had a multi uploader, but the new one lets you edit titles and description for individual postings.

Choose destinations

For each upload you can select the destinations. This means you can decide if the picture has to go to all your social sites or just a selection.

Thanks @dim, @photojeanique, @dutchessje, @gersonveenstra, @johanderowan, @daansip, @remco72 and @molislaegers for testing and your helpful feedback.

Show your Moby love by posting a picture of you with hashtag #mobycam to try the webcam upload!

The year once again comes to an end.

And what a year it has been for us.

Moby grew and grew. Our APIs are used in over 1300 different applications. We got users and visitors in over 233 different countries (I thought there were only 192, but not according to Google Analytics).

With the holidays coming up (not for us because we’re working on some really cool MobyNow platforms for FC Ajax and the Top Notch label) it is time for our annual Christmas card!

This personalized card highlights your top 5 most loved shared adventures of 2011.

For me these were:

1. January 7th

The moment  during 50th birthday party of Erwin Blom, where  @erwblo together with Tender we’re playing the guitar while @pipblom (age 14) sang a really nice cover of a Gorillaz song. Mom @daalder was filming the thing of course. I actually ripped the audio for a small slideshow about me an my kids a few weeks later. (of course thanking the Blom family in the credits)

views: 2048 

2. February 17th – “great shot #mobyteam #bowlr (by @marlooz) (http://moby.to/fitsrl)

Bowlr. The annual fun media event which we sponsored with the www.superbowlr.com  MobyNow platform. This years theme was New Kids, which is like the closest you can get to a trailer trash community theme in The Netherlands. Hence my great moustache. This is the Moby Team picture whih of course was interesting enough to retweet over and over again.

views: 1751

3. May 2nd – “history according to photohop #osama” (NSFW http://moby.to/quane1)

They got him. Osama got foud and killed and the “evidence” started started to circulate the web. Pretty soon we once again experienced people are good with Photoshop.

views: 2528

4. January 15th – “new integration on MobyNow I’m about to announce at #esns11″ (http://moby.to/9mfgo6)

I presented MobyNow at the Eurosonic festival in Groningen. MobyNow was about half a year old and the results were impressive. MobyNow continues to evolve into a versatile platform, I often compare it to a social open WordPress. We integrate withall the major open platforms and today I announced some new modules at the event. In he second week of 2012 we’ll launch the new TopNotch platform which is totally powered by MobyNow and a few weeks ago we launched http://nickjonas.mobynow.com <- read more about that if you’re interested here). views 2050 

5. October 8th – “briljant” (http://moby.to/3fckkg)

Steve died May he rest in peace.

views: 2634 

http://mobypicture.com/user/[yourusername]/bestof2011

Oh, below the card there are the share, like and +1 buttons… use em if you wish to share your year!

Please tell us the stories behind your top 5 below in the comments, that is inspiring for all of us and lets you reminisce 2011.

We wish you a great 2012!

The Moby Team

Today we’re releasing the new Moby iPhone app.
(press get overview all features here! Moby iPhone app 2.01 – feature overview and download Moby-iPhone-App-kit)

We’ve been working on it for quite some time.

The new app is packed with nice features but most importantly let’s you share photo, video and audio adventures to your favorite social networks.
For each posting you can decide where it should be posted.

You can find the app page here and a break down of all the features in a nice PDF here.

I’m highlighting some of my favorite things in the app.

First of all. The stream.

The Stream allows you to follow all your friends from within the app. You can easily browse through the latest postings.
If you tap an image you get to the item view. Here you find the view count, to which platforms the posting was sent. (you can also tap on the icons to see the posting on those sites)
If you tap the image you can see the bigger version and zoom in.

your Mobys on the map
When a Moby is geotagged by the uploader, a small map is shown below the posting on the item screen. You can tap the map and this lets you explore other content around that spot.
While uploading photo, video or audio with the app, you can easily choose whether or not to share your location with each individual posting.

personally I really like the Explore tab.
You can easily search for content using full text search. You can look at trending content (50 postings with the most activity) and you can explore postings around you on the map.

In the coming period we’ll do quick iterations and we’ll be adding some nice features, views and notifications. Please promote the app with your friends and give us your feedback so we can use that in our upcoming releases!

download the app here

Next up Blackberry and Android.

Last weekend I’ve posted my 20.000th Mobypicture posting. That makes me a Moby addict. An addict for sharing life.
It doesn’t feel like that many, but that’s something all addicts probably say.

Ironically I made that 20.000th Moby at FOAM. Erik Kessels and three other guest curators were asked to envision their ideas about the future of photography exhibitions.

My Moby adventure started in 2003.

I registered the domain on februari 23rd in the afternoon. I’ve been brainstorming with a business partner on names and finally came up with Mobypicture. It phonetically referenced the mobile revolution and picture sharing, but also famous the Herman Melville novel Moby Dick.

That novel describes the life long hunt of Captain Ahab for the vicious white whale Moby Dick who bit off his leg. That hunt for me is synonym for the hunt for adventures and challenges we stumble upon in our daily lives. This weekend I received a beautiful book by Matt Kish from my girlfriend. Matt made an illustration for every single page in the Moby Dick novel (552 illustrations).

In the foreword he had the best description which I’ll be quoting every time from now on when people ask me about the company name:

“Friends often question my obsession with the novel, especially since I am not a scholar or even an educator any longer, and the best explanation I have been able to come up with is that, to me, Moby-Dick is a book about everything. God, Love, Hate, Identity, Race, Sex, Obsession, History, Work. Capitalism. I could go on and on. I see every aspect of life reflected in the bizarre mosaic of this book.”

The 20.000th Moby milestone is not really important, but numbers make you think and look back at what happened. The good thing about Moby of course is that all your adventures are preserved. So I was checking some nice highlight in my life since Moby started helping me share it.

My first Moby:

May 3, 2004
The two neighbouring cats were lying in the sun on the deck of the MobyBoat. I used a Sony Cybershot and attached a cable (yes kids, a cable) to my computer to first download the photo from the camera before uploading it using the webupload.
To my surprise the Moby has 575 views (and counting) and we only started counting the views in 2009! I didn’t like cats at all, but these cats grew on me and a few years later I got two of my own.

Our first design:

May 5, 2004
Okay, don’t laugh. Mobypicture was not live yet, but this was the design proposal by Robert Kerssing. We were really happy with it!

The day my nephew was born:

August 14, 2004
Moby was there! Max weighted 4.000 grams.

Realtime internationally teasing people about the weather.

January 4, 2005
I was stoked this worked from somewhere deep in the Egyptian desert in January 2005.

Capturing my kayak moments

July 26, 2005
Here sending a live picture to my grandpa. He died a few years back.

Realtime sharing the first time I ever saw my little girl

January 18, 2006

3 months before she was born.

3 months later

April 24, 2006
There she was! Moby was there as well.

Her first time on the beach

August 17, 2007

Twitter

August 10, 2007
Up to now, I used Mobypicture as a mobile blog. A journal to capture and share moments in my life. I started using Twitter on june 1st 2007. This enabled other people to easily follow my thoughts and adventures. Sharing pictures on Twitter was not possible yet and I decided to hook my small mobile blogging platform to the Twitter API. We launched a beta today. Mashable wrote about it a few days later after we also added Flickr as a destination. The user base started to grow.

Here came the revolution

September 21, 2007
The iPhone Hack Battle. Boris from TNW brought 20 iPhones from the US months before it came out in The Netherlands. We had to follow on line tutorial to jailbreak the phones. The Apple camp was battling the Windows camp for the first working phone. We won.
The launch of the iPhone brought momentum for Mobypicture. Taking pictures and later video and sharing this easily in simple intuitive ways was revolutionized by the introduction of this Phone and its Operating System.

Picnic

September 26, 2007
We sort of launched the new ‘company’ at Picnic, where the hardcore Dutch Twitter clan was using Mobypicture to share the event experience with its followers. I stumbled into @biz who was amazed by the growth of their API and smart usage of the possibilities. He had not foreseen the possibilities.
(Biz stone BTW was user number 2135 on Mobypicture but has never tried the service although he has 100 followers there )

Mika

November 20, 2007
My son was born, and Moby there (http://moby.to/mika)

Four days later

November 24, 2007
Mika got ill, he had a hard time breathing and had to stay in the hospital for over a week. Sharing these frightening moments with Moby really helped me feel connected and supported and was priceless.

He came out strong

January 7, 2008

I can of course go on and on about the adventures with which Moby accompanied me…

…indeed covering all aspects of life. God, Love, Hate, Identity, Race, Sex, Obsession, History, Work. Capitalism. I could go on and on.

With the new Operating System for iPhone and iPad, launching today it will be really easy to post your pictures to the Twitter picture service, right from your photo library.

This was already really simple for posting to Mobypicture straight from the library, but we’re refreshing your memory with a small how-to:

Step 1: Take a picture with your iPhone

You know how to do that right?

Step 2: select the picture in the library

Step 3: Click the share button

Step 4: Email Photo

Step 5: Now select Moby from your address book (how to get Moby in your address book?)

And of course we post your photos, but ALSO video or audio snippets of your life to your friends on all your social networks, not just to Twitter.

More tips:

1. Add Moby to your address book first: username.pin@mobypicture.com  (example mobycrew.1234@mobypicture.com)

(Don’t know your Moby pin anymore? Login with your Twitter credentials and go to your account www.mobypicture.com/account)

2. Email Subject: this will be your tweet

3. Email Body: this will be the description

4. you can use mentions and hashtags in either your title or subject to connect these in your Mobys

5. if you allowed your geo location to be stored in your photos, Moby will also display this with your postings.

Twitter app for iPhone iOS5 update

If you’re using the official Twitter for iPhone app and updated it for iOS5 Twitter automatically sets your photo sharing service to the new Twitter picture service. This means of course that your photos won’t be posted to your other services anymore. You can easily change the setting back to Mobypicture in your setting. Mark de Kock blogged about this and shared a small how to change your setting schematic with us. Check the steps below:

Dear Nick,

We really like you here at Mobypicture HQ. But your website is very outdated with the not working LaLa and Myspace elements.
That’s why we developed a MobyNow platform for you and your fans.

This means that from now on, all the traffic your Mobypicture postings generate when you post to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube will end up on your own website instead of on Mobypicture.com.

To see how this works: Click on the “Moby.to”-link in your latest tweet!

Here of course you have full control on all the other content and communication. But there’s more!

Fans
If your fans post pictures using Mobypicture during your concerts or public appearances and use your name or the hashtag #nickjonas, @nickjonas or “Nick Jonas”, their traffic can also be directed to their fan account on your website! Here of course you can engage with them, promoting your concerts and music. Check all the fan streams that are already there!

Right now we sort of used your design to make this consistent with your website and we used a mobynow subdomain. We can of course alter this for you, add features and content streams. MobyNow can also aggregate other social media sites like YouTube, Foursquare and Songkick, so let us know what you would like to add and we’ll put it up on the platform.

MobyNow is used by some artists in The Netherlands already, take a look at the website of Ilse DeLange, but also by events like the Burning Man festival, sports, movies and cultural sites.

So far we’ve integrated:

• your Mobypicture postings
• your Tweets
• your YouTube channel
• your Facebook like button
• your Soundcloud
• the tweets of fans and your band members

Of course we can add more sources and change stuff if you’d like! (we used your old website design for now, but can change that easily)
We can also get you and your crew up to speed on how to get the most out of the new platform.

Keep up the vibe, Shoot n Share,

Mathys van Abbe
Founder Mobypicture

As an experiment we added Google+ as a posting destination on Mobypicture.
This means that when you post your adventures, using the native Mobypicture apps or any of the over 1200 Moby powered applications (Twittelator, Twitteriffic, Tweetdeck, Twitter for iPhone, Plume for Android, Gravity for Symbian, etc. etc.), your photo, video and audio postings can also be shared in your G+ account!

Labs
Google hasn’t released any APIs for Google+ yet, so we had to develop a workaround to make the integration possible. This also is the reason why we call this an experiment and launch the integration in our Labs environment.

How can you use it?

1. Goto moby.to/gplus and follow the steps

2. Share your photo, video or audio adventures using Mobypicture (check Zendesk on how to set it up for your favorite apps)

3. This is how the posting ends up in your timeline:

Feedback or running in to problem?
Leave your comment on my G+ account (http://gplus.to/mathys)

Reminder
Why use Mobypicture! (tell your friends!)

With all these sharing and picture apps, why should you actually use Moby? A question I get pretty often.

Well there is a lot of reasons, some are obvious, others need a closer look.

Especially for this we’ve made a page in Zendesk explaining our USPs.

Take a look and share this with your friends!

You can share this info directly using the following tiny url – > http://moby.to/why

source: XKCD

push the button
I’ve been experimenting with Google+ (find and add me here) for a few days now and we started adding support for the +1 button as of today.

Although there is no way to post Mobys to +1 yet (they didn’t release any APIs yet) this is a first to step towards integration.

You find the +1-buttons in the footer (please +1 us if you like us), the group pages, the Moby Friend Finder and of course all the item pages.

FB vs Google+
I think that Facebook does a better job, showing ‘likes’ than Google shows ‘+1′. Google only shows these in the ‘+1 tab’, not the main posts stream.

What I do like is that Google lets us know about the fact someone clicked the ‘+1′-button. This means we can use the activity in our trending and context features. Facebook doesn’t provide us with an option like that yet.

Integrating Picasa
Yesterday I asked my public circle if we should add Picasa as a posting destination, but we don’t really like the way Google has integrated postings to Picasa in the streams. It does show the content in the photos tab, but that doesn’t really add to the real-time sharing experience Mobypicture is all about. We hope the full API comes out soon!

There’s also an interesting discussion on Washington Post about the dangers Google may carry for photographers.

Looking forward to the upcoming year of social sharing! Exciting times ahead.
Oh, and check out Social Statistics to find the top 100 Google+ followed peeps and track your own following.

Our friend Vodafone has kindly asked us to use Mobypicture in their roaming product campaign.
This resulted in a really nice commercial about how you can, now for only € 2 per day, send up to 20 Mobypicture postings from your holiday destination.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPBQ85Cnjos[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPDaFJCmAuE[/youtube]

This commercial was broadcasted on Dutch Television over the last few weeks and is at the moment visible throughout the country on billboard and other outdoor advertising.

Below you can watch the commercial and see the billboard design.

If you Spot The Moby Campaign, please Moby it using #stmc! (preferably with yourself in the reflection)
And add the link in the comments!!

http://moby.to/vo8m57 (by @thomasdral)

Thanks Vodafone for this great opportunity!
Shoot and share, now also when you are on your vacation!