The Pixelpipe Blog

Posting through Mauku & other Twitter clients to Pixelpipe

January 26, 2010 · 2 Comments

We’re opening up a number of our supported APIs to the public and are starting with Twitter. You can now post through Pixelpipe from popular Twitter clients that allow you to set the service including Mauku, Spaz & Tweetie 2 by simply setting the endpoint URL to http://api.pixelpipe.com/services/twitter/ & logging in with your Twitter credentials.

The big advantage of posting through Pixelpipe is that you can now post to over 25 services at the same time you update your Twitter status. For example you could setup your Facebook, MySpace & Yahoo! Meme accounts with Pixelpipe & update all when you post to Twitter. You can even update your blog from your Twitter client (see tips).

Setup is similar for each app however here are the specifics to get Mauku on the Nokia N900 setup and plugged-in.

1. Open Mauku select the blue arrow on the top menu & choose “Publishers”
2. Select “New” & then “Advanced”
3. Set Pixelpipe as the name and Twiiter as the provider & then “OK”
4. Set the URL to http://api.pixelpipe.com/services/twitter/ and the Password & Login to your Twitter credentials

5. Now click on the blurry area on top to return to the Mauku, if you set things up you’ll see your Twitter feed in the Overview.

Now everytime you post we’ll route the post through Pixelpipe enabling you to post to multiple services at the same time.

Tips:

- We’ll create a Pixelpipe if you don’t have one with these credentials, you can log-in and add services or change your settings at pixelpipe.com or m.pixelpipe.com for mobile users.

- You can use Routing Tags to override your default services and post to specific services or groups. For example including @facebook,@plurk,@jaiku in the body would send the post to the three mentioned services however not to Twitter (we’ll strip out the tags). More on Routing Tags can be found on our blog.

- By default a blog service wouldn’t accept a status update however you can override the behavior by including the routing tag for the service eg. @wordpress,@blogger,@twitter would send the post to both blogs & Twitter.

- You can create groups by giving the same Routing Tag to multiple services and force routing with just one tag

→ 2 CommentsCategories: features
Tagged: API, mauku, mobile, nokia, spaz, status, tweetie, Twitter

Announcing Pixelpipe 2.0 for Android, one click photo uploads & more

January 7, 2010 · 9 Comments

We’ve released a major update to our Android client this afternoon. This client is built on top of our previous Android applications and provides uploading of Photos, Video, Audio & blog/status posts to over 120 currently supported Pixelpipe services. The client does however add a few significant new features.

- One click publishing from the camera: This feature eliminates the hassle of having to open up a 3rd party application for uploading after the point of capture. The user shoots a picture with the phone’s built-in camera application, after the image is captured we pop up a dialog that allows the user to add Title, Caption & Tags and upload in the background. Users can even select from a list of services in a GUI and click on the services they’d like to upload to in this dialog. Imagine taking a picture and sending it to Picasa, Twitter & Facebook at the same time in a few seconds to get an idea of how the feature will be used.

- Automatic publishing: This feature eliminates the dialog in the previous feature and automatically publishes every photo captured in the background. This feature could be useful for users that are publishing a lifestream or even automatic backups of images to our supported online storage services like Evernote, Acrobat.com or Box, even sending to their personal FTP server is possible. The feature is also complimentary for Twitter users with our new time based grouping for Twitter posts we recently introduced. Imagine setting a 24 hour delay while on vacation and having all of your images automatically uploaded to be published at the end of the day as one Tweet to get an idea of usage. You can read more about this feature at A utomatically-grouped-media-for-twitter-posts/

Here’s a brief demo of these two features in action Click Here

The update supports all Android phones from the old G1 to the latest Motorola Droid & Nexus One, all phones with and OS level above 1.5 (cupcake) can take advantage of these features. We’ll also be updating our single service applications for Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, TinyPic, Twitter & Yahoo Meme throughout the day.

Please checkout the clients and let us know what you think!

→ 9 CommentsCategories: features

New Features: Time based grouping of media for Twitter posts, inline geo-location & previous upload stream!

December 30, 2009 · 8 Comments

Have you ever wanted to say more on Twitter then a 140 characters or a few lines of text and a photo? We’ve introduced a new feature that will automatically group media from your Twitter uploads into one post based on a specified amount of time including your geo-location. The best thing about this feature is that it happens automatically, you just specify the amount time from 2min to a full day and we’ll hold your uploads and send just one shortened pi.pe link to Twitter.

Each Pixelpipe pi.pe page can contain a combination of photos, video, audio & even files, the contents of the uploads are posted with the oldest at the top so your viewers can see your story in the order you posted. A good example of usage would be a vacation where you’re posting photos & videos with a 24 hour delay for grouping before we post a single Tweet to your followers. A more typical example would be a few posts with our default 5 min delay as you’ll find in this example from my lunch at Bento415 yesterday http://pi.pe/-wtj94p.

Here’s an example of a pi.pe page demonstrating the media uploaded, geo-location and our new previous uploads stream view (on the right). One item to note is that the previous uploads view is specific to this Pixelpipe service and will only contain media you’ve uploaded to this specific Twitter Pipe. What this means is that your family pictures uploaded to Kodak for example will not be viewable in this stream, only the pictures you’ve previously uploaded to this Twitter Pipe.

→ 8 CommentsCategories: features
Tagged: geo-location, Twitter

Posting status updates and blog posts from your Nokia N900 Instant Messaging client via Pixelpipe

December 28, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Have you ever wanted to update your status on Facebook or post to Twitter directly from your N900s Instant message client? Now you can with the built in Conversations application on your Nokia N900. In just a few easy steps you can add Pixelpipe as an IM contact and start posting to your favorite blog & status serviced from the built-in Contacts & Conversations applications.

These are the steps we utilized to add Pixelpipe as a buddy to the Google Talk, Jabber or Ovi messaging services, you can use the built-in IM client or a 3rd party application like Pidgin if you prefer. Let’s get started!

1. Open the Contacts application on your N900 and create a new contact called Pixelpipe, you’ll then need to select “add field” and scroll down and select the type of IM service you’re utilizing such as Google Talk or Ovi.

2. In the new service field enter pixelpipe@im.pixelpipe.com as the address and save.

3. Now open the new Pixelpipe contact and select the IM service option from the Contacts or Conversations applications.

4. You now you need to send Pixelpipe a message with your application key so we can bind your IM address to your Pixelpipe account. You can find your Application key and specific instructions at http://pixelpipe.com/tools under the Instant Messaging heading. Note: You’ll need to sign-in to see your application key & the format to send is “verify-application_key“

6. You can now add your favorite mico-blogs and status services from http://pixelpipe.com from the desktop or http://m.pixelpipe.com from your handset and start posting from Nokia Contacts & Conversations on your N900.

7. Enjoy!

→ Leave a CommentCategories: features
Tagged: n900, nokia

What’s new in Pixelpipe 1.5 for iPhone?

November 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

After over a year in the iPhone App Store and millions of your photo & video uploads we’ve learned a few things along the way about what you love & need from our iPhone client. We’ve been improving along the way however our latest 1.5 release should answer the majority of your unanswered desires.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s new in Pixelpipe 1.5 for iPhone

1. Fast startups: We’re now storing all of your media information in a small local database and only scan for changes on launch. You can now configure a quantity (25, 50, 100 or 200) of items to be pre-loaded in Settings as well which provides huge performance gains for users with large collections.

2. Tag caching: As you add new tags to your media we now cache the new tags and make them available to you for future use (just swipe to delete). You can simply select the “Tags” button to load up a list of your previous tags and select them with just a touch. Tip: Enter the Routing Tags for your favorite services to override your defaults eg. @picasa,@meme would only upload to Google Picasa and Yahoo Meme (when configured). (The tag cache feature is highlighted in yellow as you may have guessed).

3. Landscape view: We knew it’d be useful to allow landscape view in our Status & Blog views for quicker text entry however have extended the feature throughout the application. You can now utilize both portrait & landscape views throughout the application.

4. Video capture & Edit: Capturing from the Camera view now allows for capture of both photos & video, video user can even set the in-point at the time of capture.

There’s more features & fixes however we know it’s more fun to find the feature on your own. Enjoy!

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We’re now supporting geotagging with Twitter updates on Android

November 20, 2009 · 2 Comments

Twitter released support for their Geotagging API yesterday, the API allows us to pass on your location (optional) when making status updates from with-in our applications. We’ve exposed the feature first in our Pixelpipe Pro, Lite and Twitter applications for Android however will soon be rolling the feature into our other platforms.

To use utilize the feature you’ll need to first enable the feature in your Twitter settings & then just enable the “Geo On” button when making a Tweet from inside any of our supported Android applications. You’ll only be able to view the location in a few services at the moment however we expect that to quickly change. More details about the new feature can be found on the Twitter blog with details about the supported services for viewing can be found at http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/think-globally-tweet-locally.html.

→ 2 CommentsCategories: features

Pixelpipe supported services update 11-09

November 7, 2009 · 6 Comments

We released a big service update last night that included a number of new Pipes as well as significant enhancements to the Pixelpipe platform.

Since our client applications are automatically updated when we add new services these are all available now from any of our mobile and desktop applications.

Here’s a break down of the latest service updates and their capabilities.

New Pipes:

- Google Docs: Upload documents directly to your Google Docs account

- Google OCR: Upload a photo of a document, Google will convert the photo to text and place the document in your Google Docs account. Neat!

- docstoc: Online document storage & sharing

- CNN iReport: Upload photos, video and audio files directly to your iReport account for citizen journalist on the go.

- ScreenTweet: Send photos to Twitter

- Sendspace: Online file storage and sharing

- Skyrock: Popular Social Network out of France, supports photos, blogging and status updates

- Twicli: Media sharing for Twitter, supports photo, video & audio files

- TwitLens: Send photos to Twitter

-Twitsnaps: Send photos to Twitter

- Yahoo Status: Update your status across Yahoo networks with micro-blog style updates

- Yahoo Meme: Yahoo’s up and coming competitor to Twitter, supports inline photos and status/micro-blog posts

- Yammer: A private/group version of Twiiter, supports micro-blog posts, be careful with this one since your entire company might be reading your posts!

Removed Pipes:

- SMS services: We were having issues with reliable delivery of the messages so removed the SMS services for evaluation.

- Seesmic: The video services weren’t reliable enough

- Squarespace: Not enough users

- Qipit: They’re discontinuing their consumer offering

- Brightkite: Our API integration was broken in their last service update. We’re trying to get the issue resolved now and will get them back into the list of available services ASAP!

→ 6 CommentsCategories: features

Introducing Atom 1.0 publishing for Nokia Share Online

November 2, 2009 · 4 Comments

We’re rolling out support for Atom 1.0 publish protocol for Nokia Share Online users and wanted to invite you all to test out the integration in advance. While there are some advantages to 1.0 like 25% faster uploads & photo feeds (coming soon) it’s not without a cost since Nokia decided not to support Titles in the Share Online client. You can however still send photos, video, audio and files with a caption & tags however just without a title.

If you feel you must have titles with your uploads you can stick with our existing Atom 0.3 (Lifeblog) integration. If you have a need for speed and can do without the titles here’s a set of quick instructions to getting the new Atom 1.0 plug-in installed and configured.

1. Download the plug-in from http://tr.im/DXfO directly to your Nokia or to your desktop and transfer to your phone.

2. Open the Pixelpipe configuration from your phone’s Inbox to install to Share Online

3. Now open the Share Online application on your phone and select Pixelpipe

4. Select Yes if you have a Pixelpipe account otherwise choose No and create an account and return

5. Now it’s time to enter your account details to authenticate and link the plug-in to your PP account. For the Name you’ll use the email address associated with your account, the Password however is not your normal password and is unique application key that you can find at the bottom of this page http://m.pixelpipe.com/settings. We use the App Key instead of a password since the encryption utilized by Atom isn’t very strong and we want to protect your privacy, we’re not trying to be difficult .

6. Your plug-in will now be updated to use our Atom 1.0 endoint for uploads and will automatically start displaying photo feeds as soon as they’re available.

Let us know if you experience any issues while testing the new features Atom 1.0 features at beta@pixelpipe.com.

→ 4 CommentsCategories: features
Tagged: atom, nokia, publishing, share online

Enabling the Nokia N900 to the Social Web with Pixelpipe

October 17, 2009 · 15 Comments

Now that the mighty Nokia N900 is making it’s way out to the public we thought it’d be a good time to post a brief guide to getting the N900 connected to the Social Web via Pixelpipe. Here’s a quick overview of how to get your N900 publishing photos and video to over 115 services across the globe with the Pixelpipe plug-in.

Why is this awesome?

- We allow upload directly to the N900 camera and gallery applications to allow for effortless publishing.

- Background uploads! Once you’ve started an upload(s) it’ll go into a queue and deliver your media while your N900 is available and connected via an internet connection.

- Use N900’s Tag Cloud to send to specific services at the time of upload. Just include the service name with an @prefix or create your own custom groups with our Routing Tags feature.

To get started simply:

- Install the Pixelpipe plug-in (only 27kb) from the N900 App. manager

- Authenticate or create a new Pixelpipe account.

- Add any services you’d like from http://m.pixelpipe.com/destinations/add

- You can now configure your preferences for upload from the Sharing accounts settings on the N900

Pixelpipe settings

Title,Description & Tags

- Select your media and set title and description

- Use the Tag Clouds feature to set tags for your media with a touch or use our Routing Tags feature to send to specific destinations with our Routings Tags feature eg. @twitter, @facebook

set tags with a touch or use Routing Tags to send to destinations with Routings Tags eg. @twitter, @facebook

Your media uploads will now proceed in the background after you click the “Share” button as you continue to utilize your N900.

Please feel free to send any questions or feedback to nokia@pixelpipe.com.

→ 15 CommentsCategories: features
Tagged: maemo, n900, nokia, Pixelpipe, upload