How Now Brownpau

Good news: (Yay!) The mobile blog, aka “Mobrownpau,” is back, running on Blogger via my GSM phone. Right now it’s on a default template; that will change when I have time to work on it.

Bad news: (Boo!) Blogger’s email-to-post feature can’t take image attachments from MMS, so I’m limited to plain text entries just like I was on the now-defunct AIM Bloggerbot.

Good news: (Yay!) Seeing a tip from Matt, I re-registered with Flickr, and found that posting of photos to blogs — to mobrownpau, in this case — is so easy and seamless that it’s amazing. Exactly the solution I’ve been needing.

Bad news: (Boo!) I can’t get the name “brownpau” on Flickr! Apparently some kind of db hitch kept the username “taken” after I deleted the old account. Or worse, there’s also the slim chance that someone else registered it; WHO COULD BE SO EVIL?! At the very least, my People and Photos pages bear the proper alias. (Update: Just got a message from Stewart, and it’s all fixed: I have my username back. Yay!)

So until I can get this Flickr screen name issue straightened out with support, I won’t be participating in any “friending” activity there; right now I’m on it for the moblog capability. And it certainly is capable; photography, hand in hand with social networking — what a fantastic community idea. Admittedly, the Flash-based rich media chat feature is a bit intimidating to me, and it bogs down older machines’ performance considerably, but the interface — free and open drag-and-drop realtime photo sharing via an IRC-ish interface — is defining the shape of things to come I smell the future in this venture, and it is spicy with the scent of promise.

Google knows it too, I think. That’s why they acquired Picasa. Big things are on the horizon.