TechgnosisWeb Prime

Well, the comparison continues, and while at first it seemed that Flickr was ahead, TA has surged forward until they’re neck and neck again. There were a few features that Flickr had that I thought TA didn’t, but thanks to a visit and comment by Chris, the *Founder* of Textamerica (Man, I really do get the best people commenting on my blog. Not some PR flunky, but the *founder* of the service I’m trying out. Dizzamn.), I was set straight. Turns out I was using an older template that didn’t have all the new features implemented yet, and that they do have a FlashBox like the Flickr one that’s over on the left there. So I went in and updated my template on the Techgnosisweb Moblog on Textamerica, and Chris was right, it’s much better, feature-wise. I kinda miss my little red robots, butthe look is nice and clean.. and I read somewhere about a CSS hack that I might be able to eventually use to put some robots up there anyway.

I also checked out their FlashBox, and this is it below, compare and contrast to the Flickr one on right. I can’t put up both FlashBoxen at the same time, I just don’t have room in the blog layout for it, but I’m thinking that, at least while I’m doing this month-long comparison, I might switch between them, the Flickr one this week, then the TA one next week, and so forth and so on, and see which one you guys like best and use more.

(There seems to have been some sort of weird glitch when I uploaded the latest pics this morning, I got an ASP error when uploading… they finally did upload fine, but for some reason the FlashBox is showing my latest 3 images as the same one. The moblog itself was doing the same, I went in and edited the entries to the correct images, but the FlashBox seems to be showing the old ones anyway. If you’re still out there, Chris, any ideas?)

So, here’s a quick rundown, after Week 1 is pretty much over, of what I like and don’t like about each service so far. Take notes, kids, there will be a test. Both services ave many features in common, including being able to upload pics straight from the camphone over email, accepting comments on images, being able to email pointers to my images through email, the ability to annotate parts of images using Flash rollovers, community moblogging (althought they do take slightly different approaches to this), etc. What follows are things that I think separate the two services:
Flickr:
Likes
- Nice, clean interface.
- Editing features are integrated nicely into the viewing interface itself, don’t need to hop back and forth between control panel and main moblog display to do edits.
- Love the way I can play with the URL’s to browse images, tags, and users easily.
- Slightly less intrusive ads (both have Google ads, which is much better than regular ads, but while Flickr puts them in a sidebar and out of the way, TA plops them a banner ad format up on top. I understand bills gotta get paid, but I still dislike banner ads. Either way, whichever service I stick with at the end, I might go ahead and plop down the cash for a paid account, which would make the ad issue moot)

Textamerica:
Likes
- The blog-like interface is very nice and has lots of features built in.
- Despite having to go into a separate control panel for most editing functions, once you’re in there, it gives you a lot of power. Very useful.
- Posting movies! This is something TA has that Flickr doesn’t, at all. My phone can take little 30 second video clips in the .3gp format (need Quicktime installed to view). Sure, they’re short, they’re grainy, they’re low-framerate… but they’re movies! And the viewer is integrated right into the page. I don’t take too many videos with the Motorola v551, but if I do start making more of them, then this feature alone might make the decision for me.
- Lots more options in the FlashBox area. I can select the latest 12, 9, 6, or 4 images, making the Flashbox a lot easier to integrate into this blog. And they have a FlashGallery thing that’s quite nice, I’ll have to play with it more and see how much I like it. First impression: I might have to redesign the blog around it!

So, both services have their things. Still 3 weeks to go in this epic picture-sharing showdown, and it’s anyone’s game. I am, of course, open to bribes from either camp.