furtiv blog

It’s a modest number, but nevertheless an important milestone for us here at furtiv. We just crossed 500,000 downloads of our plug-ins from the Ovi Store. We thought this could be a good occasion to share some other interesting statistics with you:

• Our plug-ins have been downloaded from 205 different countries and territories, with UK, Italy, India, Mexico, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia among the places where our plug-ins are downloaded the most.
• Our servers are currently handling close to 600,000 photo, video and audio uploads as well as 12,000,000 content feed updates every month.
• The devices where our plug-ins are used the most are 5800 XpressMusic, N97, E71, E72, 5530 XpressMusic, E63 and N95
• Our Facebook and Twitter plug-ins are by far the most popular. However, recent additions like Orkut and Dropbox are getting a good number of downloads. You can see our complete list of plug-ins in the Ovi Store as well as directly in our mobile website http://furtiv.mobi.
• Also our premium (non-free) plug-ins for YouTube, Dropbox, Picasa Web Albums and TwitVid are showing a positive trend in the last few weeks.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to the 500 million downloads mark.

We’ve been playing with the foursquare API for the last few months, but so far, we have been putting off releasing a photo upload plug-in for this service. The reason is that foursquare imposes too many technical limitations to achieve a user experience comparable to our other media upload plug-ins:

• No support for photos as part of check-ins or shouts. We are forced to upload the photos to another website and post a link in foursquare.
• Links to external photo websites in foursquare.com or official clients are disabled. You can see the photo links but you can’t click on them.
• You can only click on the photo links in Twitter or Facebook if you have linked them to your foursquare account.
• We are limited to sending shouts, not check-ins, as we cannot know the venue when uploading photos directly from the Camera or Gallery (we can’t really blame foursquare for this one, it’s just the nature of their service and the technology we use).
• Even though we send location coordinates when uploading geotagged media, foursquare seems to do nothing with them. Shouts are not placed on the map.

Nevertheless, today we’ve decided to make public our foursquare plug-in for Symbian phones as an experimental feature (i.e. this is even less ready than beta and is meant only for our most adventurous users). The idea is to get feedback and ideas for improvement. As always, you can get the plug-in by pointing your mobile browser to http://furtiv.mobi

Yes, the plug-in has all the limitations listed above, but it’s still a pretty neat way to quickly shout a photo in foursquare and send it to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. The typical use case is to shout some photos of a bar/restaurant/person/dish/drink after you have checked-in to a venue. As there is no official foursquare app for Symbian yet, our plug-in adds a bookmark to the foursquare mobile website in your phone’s browser. It is pretty spartan but it allows you to check-in to venues and see where your friends are.

We look forward to your feedback and ideas. We also promise to improve this plug-in whenever foursquare offers better support for photos.

Just a quick note to let you know that all our new plug-ins have been approved and published in the Ovi Store. Right now we have plugins for YouTube, Facebook, TweetPhoto, Picasa Web Albums, TwitPic, Dropbox, MySpace, Orkut, yfrog, img.ly, LinkedIn and Flickr available in the Ovi Store. You can see a list of plug-ins compatible with your device by visiting http://store.ovi.com/publisher/furtiv/. Of course, you can always get the furtiv plug-ins directly from http://furtiv.mobi

Here at furtiv we are big fans of Dropbox. It’s a very effortless way of keeping your personal files and documents in sync across multiple computers. It also works as online backup, which is always good given the way we abuse our laptops.

We are testing a new photo upload plug-in for Dropbox. So far, we are really digging it. It just takes one click and your photo is magically in all the computers where you have installed Dropbox. This plug-in is great for people who don’t necessarily want to share their photos online but want a super easy way of transferring their photos to their computer. You don’t have to worry about connecting cables, struggling with PC Suite software, flaky Bluetooth connections, etc. Just send your photo to Dropbox and that’s it. It works with Macs, PCs and Linux computers. Dropbox also has a mobile website where you can always access your photos along with all your other files.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think. Just point your mobile browser to http://furtiv.mobi from your compatible Nokia Symbian phone to get this beta plug-in.

UPDATE: The Pro version of our Dropbox plug-in is now available in the Ovi Store: http://store.ovi.com/content/49706 It supports uploads of full-size, original resolution photos as well as videos and sound files.

Yes, we’ve heard your feedback. You want more furtiv plug-ins. You want simple, no-hassle ways to upload photos to your favorite service directly from your Symbian phone. Here are three new upload plug-ins for you to try:

• Orkut: We’ve heard this one is really popular in places like India, Brazil and a few other countries.
• img.ly and yfrog: Two more photo sharing services for Twitter. We already have plug-ins for TwitPic and TwitPhoto, but we pay attention to your feedback and you clearly want more choice.

As always, you can get our plug-ins by pointing your mobile browser to http://furtiv.mobi or http://m.furtiv.com, whichever you find easier to remember.

These plug-ins are in beta, so we appreciate your feedback and questions. Simply leave a comment to this blog post or in our support forum http://support.furtiv.com.

We are beta testing three new photo upload plug-ins for Symbian phones. We’d appreciate your help trying them out and giving us feedback.

• MySpace: We’ve received a lot of requests to support this service. The MySpace authentication API is not very mobile friendly, so we are particularly interested in knowing if you manage to activate the plug-in with ‘older’ phones like N95 and E71.
• LinkedIn: Yes, some of you  have told us that you want to upload photos to LinkedIn. This plug-in posts a LinkedIn status update with a link to the photo. It uses TweetPhoto for photo storage and URL shortening, but, do not worry, you DO NOT need a Twitter account (and your photos will NOT be posted to Twitter). You only need your LinkedIn credentials to activate it.
• TwitPic: Back by popular demand. A couple of months ago we had to switch our Twitter plug-in to use TweetPhoto because of security changes in Twitter. Many of you stated that you wanted to be able to continue to use TwitPic when uploading photos to Twitter. We are happy to announce that TwitPic is back with its own plug-in.

You can try these plug-ins by pointing your mobile browser to http://furtiv.mobi. Feel free to leave your feedback as comments to this blog or in our support forum http://support.furtiv.com. 

Our plug-ins for Facebook, Twitter, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube and Flickr have now been downloaded more than a quarter of a million times from the Ovi Store. We have downloads from 201 countries and 32 different Nokia device models. Thanks again to all our users. We are very happy about this milestone.

We are testing a new plug-in for Flickr. We are extending support for Flickr in response to user feedback. It turns out the official Flickr uploading functionality in Nokia phones is only available in a limited number of countries and mobile operators (carriers). Many users have told us that they are stuck with no easy way to upload photos to Flickr so we decided to help.

If you can already upload photos to Flickr from your phone, there is still one good reason to try our plug-in. In addition to photos, it also supports video uploads. It’s an excellent excuse to finally give that Flickr video functionality a try. Note that if you don’t have a Flickr Pro account, you will be limited to a maximum of two videos per calendar month. But that’s not too bad if you just want to upload the occasional video along with your photos.

In order to give it a try, just point your mobile browser to http://furtiv.mobi and get the Flickr settings. We’d love to get your feedback either as comments to this blog post or in our support forum.

We’ve released a Pro version of our plug-in for Picasa Web Albums. It offers the same functionality as our free Picasa plug-in plus the following features:

• Unlimited uploads of full resolution photos (the free version shrinks them to max. 1200 pixels)
• Tagging: Add tags to your photos before uploading. Works with the tag library in you phone.

You can get the plug-in from the Ovi Store. The price is 2 EUR or its equivalent in your local currency.

UPDATE May 20, 2010: This issue has finally been fixed by Facebook.

We have received reports of problems during activation of our the furtiv plug-in for Facebook in Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. We have identified the cause of the problem as a Facebook API change that is causing the browser in 5800 to choke during activation.

For now the only solution we have is to upgrade to the latest firmware available for 5800 which is 50.X. We have confirmed that acivation works correctly if you have the latest firmware. We are also aware that this latest firmware is yet not available in all regions and for all operator branded phones. You may have to wait a few days or weeks to get this update.

Meanwhile we are working on a permanent solution that works with all firmware versions. You can follow the status on this issue and get detailed instructions on how to update in our support forum. If you are having this problems, please use the forum to send us your feedback.

UPDATE May 20, 2010: This issue has finally been fixed by Facebook.