Quicktime Vets Bring Mobile Video And Photo Sharing With Thwapr (Beta Launch)

Sharing videos on the Web is easy: Upload to YouTube or Facebook, send out a link. Sharing videos on mobile phones is still a pain. The iPhone tries to make it easier by letting you upload directly to YouTube, but what if you want to share a video privately? Sending videos between phones is cumbersome. A new service that just launched in beta called Thwapr seeks to solve this problem by letting you simply uploading videos from your phone to the Web and then texting or emailing a link to your friends. Thwapr already works with 165 phones, from iPhones and Androids to Blackberries and Samsungs. After you sign up, you can email your photos or videos to Thwapr, and then share them from there to any mobile phone that supports links in text messages. As you add contacts to Thwapr, you can select them by name. The recipients get a text message with a link which opens up their mobile browser and takes them to Thwapr's mobile website. They can see the shared photo or video and "Thwap" back a response, creating a conversation around the image. Each mobile video needs to be 20 MB or less for now. Videos are delivered a variety of ways based on the type of phone the viewer is using. On the iPhone, they come as progressive downloads which open up in the Quicktime player. Other phones support streaming video. Older Blaackberries would get the video as a file download, and Thwapr can even deliver videos as rough animated gif images for phones which can't handle anything else. Thwapr's CTO Eric Hoffert worked on the original Q