The Pixelpipe Blog

Pixelpipe now linking photos, video & audio to your Foursquare check-ins

March 13, 2010 · Leave a Comment

We’ve released support for Foursquare as a Pixelpipe destination today! You can now shout out to your followers from any Pixelpipe application with a shortened pi.pe link back to a photo, video or audio file included in the post. These shouts can be combined with any other service we offer as a destination. Posting a sound clip to audioboo & foursquare at the same time to share a clip recorded at the SXSW show you’re watching would be an example of how you might combine services.

Better yet for Android users we’re now allowing you to check-in to Foursquare venues directly from our application at the time of upload. Just use the “Share to” feature & select Foursquare as the venue, we’ll automatically pull up a list of venues in the area. It’s no problem if your venue isn’t found, just use the handy search list to expand the list of choices in the area. This feature is available now in Pixelpipe 2.0.3 and above for Android, and coming soon to other supported mobile platforms.

While we’re big fans of Foursquare here at Pixelpipe we’ve always thought the text only experience was a bit limiting. We’re excited to help you to share your experiences with your followers with links to media and direct check-ins from Android. Now it’s your turn, let’s see what you create.

Here’s an overview of the new features:

- Check-in to a Foursquare venue with linked media (text, photo, video, audio or a file) with Pixelpipe 2.03 or above for Android.
- Shout out to your foursquare friends with text & media from any Pixelpipe application
- Automatic foursquare:venue_id machine tags to Flickr when checking in to foursquare and uploading to Flickr (Android only)
- Check-in directly after capture with Share to feature from the built-in camera application (Android only).

To kick things off we’re offering Pixelpipe Pro for Android free of charge for direct download. Just visit http://tr.im/pixelpipe from your Android Phone to install the latest and start uploading photos, video & audio to over 100 services including Foursquare.

For our iPhone, Palm Pre & Nokia users you’ll still be able to shout out to their friends with media however you will not be able to check-in at this time. This functionality is similar to a few other apps that are offering photo links in shouts however expands the functionality to support video, audio & even files in the post.

Enjoy!

- Team Pixelpipe

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Connecting your Eye-Fi to Pixelpipe for Social Web publishing awesomeness

March 6, 2010 · 3 Comments

Eye-Fi fans, have you ever wished you could expand on the web publishing capabilities of your Eye-Fi powered digital camera? Now you can by simply configuring your Eye-Fi card to publish through the mighty Pixelpipe Social Web Gateway.

If you’re not yet familiar with Pixelpipe then here’s a few advantages of connecting the two services:

-Post to about 100 additional services then provided by Eye-Fi alone. Our global offering of destinations range from Blogger, Twitter & Email to Kodak’s new Pulse digital picture frames. You can see a complete list at http://pixelpipe.com/capabilities.

- Send to multiple services at the same time. Would you like to upload to Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, Picasa, Tumblr, WordPress & Evernote… all at the same time? Not a problem.

- Setup and configuration of a Pixelpipe account is free, easy & enables publishing from a wide variety of desktop and mobile applications.

At this point we’re not a default service option for Eye-Fi so you’ll need to configure Eye-Fi to take advantage of our Gallery API input for Eye-Fi uploads. Here’s a few steps you’ll to perform to get your Eye-Fi set up for Pixelpipe publishing. The Eye-Fi team said they’d offer us as a dedicated service if we’re popular however for now you’ll need to configure us as a Gallery service.

To get started create a Pixelpipe account if you don’t already have one and then follow these simple instructions.

1. Open the Eye-Fi Manager & select ‘Settings’ from the top menu

2. Now select ‘change’ web sharing from Photo Destinations & select ‘Add photo service’

3. Select ‘Gallery’ from the selection and enter the following values

Username: your Pixelpipe username

Password: your Pixelpipe password

URL: http://pixelpipe.com/services/gallery/main.php

4. Now select ‘Show advanced options’ and enter the following values

Account title: Pixelpipe

Album name: Custom text

Uses photo creation date: 1

That’s it, now when you upload to Gallery from your Eye-Fi your uploads will be routed via Pixelpipe to your destinations of choice.
If you have any questions or issues you can reach us at http://getsatisfaction.com/pixelpipe. If you like the combination of services please let the Eye-Fi team know so they can add us as a dedicated service, you can reach them on Twitter as @eyeficard.

Happy Eye-Fi Uploading!

-Team Pixelpipe

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Getting Pixelpipe plugged into your Google Buzz

February 10, 2010 · 2 Comments

While we were a bit disappointed that Google didn’t make an input API that we could utilize for publishing available initially, we have to applaud Google for making it so easy for users by connecting to so many integrated services that we already support.

Getting started publishing to your Buzz feed from any of our +20 supported applications is easy, the hard part is just figuring out the right one(s) to include in your Buzz. Here’s a breakdown of the applications that can be added as a “Connected site” and our capabilities with the service and Buzz.

Twitter: When linking your Twitter account to Buzz and posting through Pixelpipe you’ll get the Tweet and a shortened link back to a http://pi.pe/ page if there is any extended text & media (photo, video, audio, file) as well as a Google Map when geo-location is included in the post in your feed.

Blogger: Posting to Blogger through Pixelpipe results in a great experience, you can make text only posts from any of our supported applications as well as media that will be displayed in the Buzz feed.

GTalk: Posting to our GTalk Pipe will update your status & include a pi.pe link to any media with a map if geo is enabled. The only thing to watch out for is that the post does not persist and will change when you update your status.

Picasa: Provides the Title & description as well as an embedded video or photos in your Buzz feed

Flickr: Provides the Title & description as well as an embedded video or photos in your Buzz feed

YouTube: Provides the Title & description as well as an embedded video in your Buzz feed

After selecting the service(s) you’d like to include just follow the instructions under connected sites in your Buzz dialog to configure the specifics.

While we can’t wait for a direct integration with Buzz, we’re happy with the launch capabilities and thrilled with the prospects Buzz will provide.

Happy Buzzing!

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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

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

January 7, 2010 · 10 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 Automatically-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!


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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.

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

December 28, 2009 · 1 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!

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What’s new in Pixelpipe 1.5 for iPhone?

November 22, 2009 · 1 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.

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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!

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