Socialcam – iPhone App of the Week

Socialcam – iPhone App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive. Originally this feature focused on iPhone and iPad apps, however I have now expanded to include Mac, Windows and Android apps.

Socialcam is the easiest way to share videos with friends. It makes sharing video from your phone as simple as uploading photos to Facebook. With a few clicks, you’re able to record, tag, and share videos as well as browse, like, and comment on your friends’ videos.

Features

– Unlimited video length and storage
– Upload video while you are recording for fastest possible upload
– Record video offline and it uploads later when you have Internet
– Tag your friends in videos
– Instant notification when you are tagged in a video
– Browse, like, and comment on your friends’ videos
– Share videos with Facebook, Twitter, Email and SMS

This week’s App is Socialcam.

Free

So what is Socialcam? Well if you remember the Seesmic video micro-blogging service, well it’s a bit like that. Though today Seesmic is much more known these days for its Twitter apps. However Socialcam is not quite like the old Seesmic video service, it’s much more akin to Instagram but for video.

You capture your video on your iPhone and then it uploads it to a server. Your video is then available to your “followers” in their video stream. Like Instagram you can be followed and follow others, so there is a social aspect to the stream. However the social is very much linked into Facebook. You can only use the service through a Facebook connection, so you do need a Facebook account. This for me is a bit of a downside, I know it means that I don’t need to create a new account, but not everyone has a Facebook account, likes having a Facebook account and you don’t really want to have to create a Facebook account just to use this app. It would appear that this may change in the future, but at this moment in time you need a Facebook account.

Once you have recorded and uploaded your video you can “share” the link with various other social services such as Twitter or even on Facebook.

The people behind Socialcam are Justin.tv the video streaming service. So as a result they probably do have the bandwidth and the server capability to meet the needs of the users of Socialcam.

One of the downsides of the service for me is that I can’t use video I have already recorded on the iPhone. I do use other apps to record video, the 8mm Vintage Camera app is a perfect example of an app I would like to use to record video and then upload that video to Socialcam.

Now what if you don’t have an iPhone? Well the app is also available for Android devices, excellent.

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