Pixamid now integrated with Instagram

Pixamid is of course great to use with friends, the easiest way that you can share photos when you are together. But Pixamid is also useful even if you are the only one using it - your photos are arranged by events, with the info on who you were with and what place you were. We made the camera fast, so you can just snap away, just like the normal camera app.

And now, if you are an Instagram user, Pixamid is even more useful. With the latest release of Pixamid (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixamid/id423850198?mt=8) you can send any photo over to Instagram to add those awesome effects and post to your followers. So you can take all your photos with Pixamid, then easily send the best of them over to Instagram.

As you can see from the screenshots below, we also support a range of other apps you might have installed, such as Evernote and Camera+.

Pixamid for Android is Now Live

How many times are you with friends & family (at a birthday party, a night out, or a holiday), all taking pictures with your phones? Pretty often. But how many times do you get a unified view of all those photos? Probably not too often, if at all…

Getting all the photos from one event just got a whole lot easier. The Pixamid Android app is now available in the Android Market. 

With this Android version, (and so many more phones now capable of using Pixamid), Pixamid is now even better at creating shared stories form your photos.

It has the same great features as the new iPhone version:

★ Instantly share the photos you take with the friends you are with, creating a single view of all the photos from one event.

★ Control who you share with - let everyone at a place get your photos, or just your friends who are with you.

★ Take your pictures very fast - the Pixamid camera is significantly faster than the native Android camera, and photos are uploaded in the cloud right away, in the background.

★ Get photos from the same place which are uploaded from other services: Instagram, Foursquare, & Facebook.

★ View all your events online at pixamid.com

★ Get a notification when someone new adds a photo to your event, or adds you to an event.

Having worked at Google, I have many friends still there. So when I would demo the great photo sharing that Pixamid brings, they of course wanted to know when the Android version was coming. I’m very happy that day is finally here. Get the free Pixamid app in the Android Market.

Major Upgrade to Pixamid iPhone App

The latest version of Pixamid is now available in the Apple App Store, so be sure to update your version, or get it here.

We spent a lot of timing improving those issues that you have let us know about, and we hope you find this version simpler, faster, and much prettier!

Here is a quick summary of the changes:

★ More flexible events - we have changed the way events work so that they can handle different ways of using them. Events can now have multiple locations, so for instance you can create an event for a weekend trip. You will get photos from everyone who joins the event, as well as from those using Pixamid at the same location.

★ We’ve also made it easier to invite your friends to an event. Once you’ve added them, they will get a push notification if they are already using Pixamid: if not, it is simple to send them an e-mail or Facebook wall invitation.

★ We have also done a complete re-design of our interface. Besides looking great, it also makes it much easier to understand how to use Pixamid.

★ Photos are no longer stored on Facebook, we use our own image hosting to store your photos.

Some great news for our users who have lots of friends on Android - soon they too will be able to have the magic of instant sharing on Pixamid. Our Android beta launch is imminent.

Note that users of the old version will still see their timeline, but will need to upgrade in order to see any events created with the new version.

Over the next several days, we’ll highlight a few of the new things in this version, but for now, we will leave you with three screenshots from the new Pixamid.

Android - Looking for Beta Testers

Great news for those of you that have been screaming for an Android version - we’re well along the way now, and looking to start beta testing in the next week.

If you are interested in being amongst the first to have Pixamid on Android, just let us know here. We’ll expect some real feedback, especially for this first wave of testers.

And if you are an iPhone user who would like to test the latest build, which is much much better than the current app store version, feel free to add details here too!

We’re featured in the App Store

Apple just put up Pixmid in the New & Noteworth section of the app store for a lot of European app stores!

New users -  you have any feedback, please let know - feedback AT pixamid.com

New feature on Pixamid Website

We’ve just added an overview of your history on Pixamid to our website. Log in to see this nice new view:

You can also delete photos from your timeline, add friends onto events, set locations, and give a name to the event.

Even if you are not using Pixamid, log in with Facebook to check it out. You can then connect Foursquare, Flickr and Picasa accounts. Pixamid then organizes your photos around check-ins, which is very handy. We’ll write more about this tomorrow, but give it a try.

More on How Pixamid Shares Photos

We built Pixamid to share photos in a smarter way. Here is an overview of how it works.

InstantShare

The core of what we do is share photos with those that you are with immediately, so that you get any photos taken at a place, and your photos are shared with other Pixamid users. Photos from others at the same place will show up in your Timeline.

This is based on the location you choose, or which we recognize from a Foursquare or Facebook check-in (if you have connected Foursquare).

So for this to work, you need to make sure your location is set. It is displayed on the camera overlay on the right.

You have a choice to share your photos with Everyone There, or only Friends There. 

Everyone There will send your photos to the Timeline of any other Pixamid user at the same place. 

Friends There will send the photos to the Timeline of any Facebook Friend that is there. You can tag them manually (using the Friend icon on the bottom left), or they will appear in the overlay if they are also using Pixamid at the same place.

You can also set the sharing to The World. This will allow anyone to see your photos, such as when you want to share them on Facebook, e-mail, or a link. This will not add them to all Pixamid users’ Timelines, however.

For cases where you want to share photos from a particular event with a wider audience, Pixamid currently supports Facebook posting and e-mail. These will generate a link to the Pixamid website, where the photos can be seen. Here’s an example of an event sharing page.

To share an event on Facebook or by e-mail, tap on an event in the Timeline (not an individual photo), then the Share icon that’s top right (example below, left).

This will open the Sharing screen, where you can choose Facebook, e-mail, or both, and customize a message. See the example below right.

Note that the original InstantShare settings are still respected. So if you want all Facebook friends or e-mail recipients to see the photos, you will need to set the sharing to The World - you can do that from within the Sharing screen, or the event screen.

And if your friends have contributed to a set of event photos, their privacy is also respected. If you choose to post to Facebook, and they had set InstantShare to Friends There, their photos will not be visible to your friends.

Hopefully, this makes it clear who automatically gets your photos in their Timeline, and how you can share your photos.

A few notes:

1. We are working to make the interface much more intuitive and explicit, so it should be much more clear within the app. Ping me if you’d like to take a look at our mocks, or join our beta testers.

2. We’ll also add more ways to share your sets with The World: posting to Twitter, embedding a slideshow in your blog, and whatever else users are wanting. Let us know.

3. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking through the privacy settings, InstantShare, and how we can give people better ways to share photos. We’ve talked to a lot of users, friends and family, and most people are looking for ways to share smarter, with a smaller audience than all of Facebook. But we want to hear from you too, so please let us know if you’d like to see something new, or different. 

Feedback AT Pixamid DOT com, or @pixamid on Twitter.

Welcome, new users!

If you’ve just started using Pixamid, we wanted to welcome you. We’ve had some great coverage from TechCrunch and Business Insider.

We are working on lots of great improvements and new features. Please let us know what you’d like to see!

One of the reasons we built Pixamid was to provide you more control over sharing of your photos. There are many times when you don’t want to share with the entire world, or all your friends, or followers. 

But there are times you do want to share sets of photos with everyone, in a social and fun way. We’re working to make this happen!

In the meantime, if you have a great set of photos you want to share, we’re happy to showcase it here on the blog. Share any event with us via e-mail (share AT pixamid.com) from within the app, and we will post up the link here. Make sure the sharing settings for that event are set to The World, so we will be able to see it.

The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

I wanted to share a short post-mortem on our recent Facebook difficulties.

Our app Pixamid is heavily reliant on Facebook - so much so that unless a user logs in with Facebook, the app is almost useless (it will still take photos and save them to the iPhone, but no magic whatsover).

We knew that by only supporting Facebook identities, we would lose some users. But the advantages for us (ease of implementing Facebook’s Single-Sign-on, the access to both a user’s social graph and a limitless photo store, and the nearly ubiquitous nature of Facebook) were huge, so we decided early on to start with Facebook-only.

We went ahead and built our app with this reliance. Users could only log in with Facebook, every photo that was taken was immediately uploaded to Facebook, users could tag their Facebook friends to share photos only with them.

We launched quietly, and started building a small but happy user base. We heard great things from users, and lots of great ideas on how to improve Pixamid.

Then, disaster struck. Facebook deleted our Facebook app, which was used by the iPhone app to store uploaded photos. Our smart camera became dumb again - the app was completely broken.

We had received no warnings from Facebook, and tried desperately to get some answers. An ex-Google colleague of mine is now at Facebook, so I got in touch. He was responsive, and promised to look into it.

The answer I got was curious. He was told that we *had* been notified on some issues, so we re-searched all of our e-mails, but could find no communication. From there, I did not hear back on a request to get copies of these supposed communications, and our request to restore the app obviously went nowhere

So we figured we did something that caused some users to complain, and we thought about what that could be. The most obvious thing (and only plausible) explanation was the photo upload process.

Pixamid uploads user photos to an album on Facebook which Pixamid creates. We set the privacy on this album to Private, so it is visible only to the user themselves. We retrieve these photos within the app to show the user, and we also retrieve them for friends you have chosen to share with.

The problem we identified: when we uploaded a photo, it generated a wall post on the user’s wall. This post had the same privacy as the album, meaning that only the user could see it. But of course, the user was not expecting the photo to be posted on their wall, and it is not easy to tell that it is private (even though we named the album (“My Private Pixamid Album”). We surmise that a few users reported this behavior, and these reports were enough to trigger our account to be deleted automatically.

Once we realized this was the likely issue, we again looked into suppressing this wall post. Luckily, Facebook had introduced this ability at the end of March (we had missed that announcement), and within an hour, we had a new Facebook app, which was no longer posting to users’ walls on photo upload. Alas, this version had to be submitted to Apple, and we waited a week to get it approved.

Looking at things in retrospect, it’s hard to say if we would have done much differently (except of course implementing the wall post suppression as soon as it was available).

We could have built our own image hosting & accounts from the start, which would have freed us from complete reliance on Facebook. But that was not our vision -  we want to offer great sharing & organization of photos, but within and supporting any image store a user already has. And with our limited resources, this would have meant a whole lot more work.

Facebook is huge, and has to police over a million developers. We all know of apps that are highly abusive, spammy, or outright evil. Facebook has to have some automated means to detect and deal with these abusive apps. But the lack of any transparency is something that Facebook must fix - developers that are trying to do the right thing need to be informed properly  of complaints. Deactivating apps without warning, and with no recourse, will seriously hinder Facebook’s ecosystem growth amongst “real developers,” leaving just the scammers and spammers.

So my advice to any real developer planning on relying only on Facebook identity: think hard on this, make sure it is the best option. If you can do it, give the user the option to not use Facebook (either some other service, or creating their own account).
And if you do only use Facebook, make a plan for the worst case. Having an iPhone app hard-coded to a specific FB app is a recipe for an unexpected 1 week hiatus.

What’s New in Pixamid 1.2

We have a new version of Pixamid in the App Store. Most importantly, it fixes the Facebook problems that left Pixamid almost useless. A full blog post on that will follow shortly - but first wanted to tell about what else is in the new version.

Easily share your event photos by e-mail or Facebook: The new Sharing functions let you post a link to your photos via e-mail or Facebook. We’ve made big improvements to the Pixamid website, your photos will look fantastic when you share them! Check out this set of photos for an example.

Great Foursquare integration - now, if you check in on Foursquare, you’re automatically collecting photos in Pixamid. If anyone uploads a photo on Foursquare or Instagram while you are at a place, Pixamid adds it to your timeline. To get this, you need to connect your Foursquare account: either from the website under “My Account”, or in the iPhone’s Settings page. 

You can now update your timeline with location info afterwards. If you did not set a particular location when you started taking photos in Pixamid, you can now go back and add that from the Event page in the app (click on any event in the timeline to access it). We recognize where you took the photos, and show nearby Foursquare locations to choose from. You can also add photos and participants after the fact.

Hope these new features are useful for you, please let us know what you think: info at pixamid.com or @pixamid on Twitter.