Momentile is a new photo sharing service with some very cool twists. There is, of course, no dearth of photo sharing services online, but momentile has come up with an interesting way to combine photo sharing and lifestreaming with the spirit of micro-blogging services like Twitter. The basic idea behind momentile is that you will upload one picture per day, so that after a year, you will have a collection of 365 pictures that represent that year. Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we do have a few invites to give away. Instructions for how to get them are at the bottom of this post. ]]>
One Photo per Day
As you would expect, you can upload your photos directly to the service, or you can send them to a personalized momentile email address. Whenever you upload a new photo, you can add a short message that will then be sent out to your followers (momentile calls them 'stalkers') by SMS, Twitter, or email. However, momentile stresses that this is only meant to inform your followers about a new photo upload and should not be confused with tagging or adding a caption to a photo. Indeed, you can't add captions to a photo yourself - only your followers can add these.
You can upload more than one picture per day, by the way, but momentile enforces its one-picture-per-day rule and will automatically discard the older picture. Every day, you have until midnight to update your picture. That constraint, of course, is the focus of the service and it does make you think twice about which picture you want to choose to represent a given day.
Not a Social Network
Momentile insists that it is not a social network, but it does have a number of social features like following other users or saving other users' photos in your own 'stash.'
365
In a way, momentile codifies the 365 meme that is pretty popular on Flickr right now into one coherent app, with a focus on the mobile aspects of sharing and taking these pictures.
Overall, momentile looks like a fun and interesting app. It does have some minor usability problems, but the core idea behind the service is pretty cool. A few weeks ago, the cool kid on the blog was Plinky, a web app that asked you a different question every day. In some ways, momentile is a logical extension of that idea and it will be interesting to see how momentile's users decide to utilize the service in the long run.
Invites
Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we have ten invites to give away for now - just send an email to 'momentile AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will get one to you ASAP.
