Are you into multimedia? Do you stream music over the web, share photos on Flickr and Picassa, watch videos at YouTube, share links with friends, and hang out in social networks? A new startup from Ubuket wants to help make access to your content from anywhere even easier. The service they provide will let you access all your media from your desktop, social network, blog, or even your mobile device. ]]>
After you sign up for ubuket, you begin creating your own "ubuket" by uploading media such as music, video, or image files. You can either browse for media on your computer, or you can enter in your credentials for various online services to associate the media stored there with your ubuket account. Additionally, through integration with Seeqpod, you can search for music online and add favorite songs to your ubuket from that service, too. The songs returned aren't stored in ubuket, only the links, which is why it's (borderline) legal. At the moment, the service supports Seeqpod, YouTube, and Picasa, but just around the corner is flickr, photobucket, and Last.fm.
Within your ubuket, you can create playlists of your media. To include media from the online services, you first enter in your credentials and then look for the "Action" button next to your files. With one click, you can add the file to a list or send the file to your friends.
The Ubuket Player
What's nice about the ubuket service is that it's accessible (or soon to be accessible) in so many different ways. There is an Adobe AIR app (download link) for running it on your desktop, Songbird users will soon be able to utilize a plugin to upload music from their library, iPhone and iPod Touch users can access ubuket from iphone.ubuket.com, and the app is available as an application on Facebook and Bebo. Your ubuket can also be embedded on any web site or blog. Sometime in April an iTunes plugin will arrive, as will apps for Hi5 and MySpace. By May, an Orkut app will be available and you'll be able to access ubuket from other, non-Apple mobile devices.
That being said, I had some issues when I tried ubuket this morning - initially my photos didn't upload, giving me a red circle - the sign of a failed upload, but on a second try the upload succeeded. Also, clicking on the "Home" button didn't seem to do anything in some cases, an accidental click on "Login" required logging in again (it didn't remember me), and overall, the Flash-based widget seemed a little clunky. However, the service is new and still being developed, so it may be worth waiting and seeing what comes of it. I like the idea of a centralized place for online media - especially one that would be accessible from my mobile phone and from facebook. But whether ubuket becomes anything more than a glorified widget is yet to be seen.
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