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Phanfare is one of the lesser known photo sharing services on the Net, but its new iPhone app is putting the company back in the spotlight. This new app, dubbed 'Photon' (iTunes link), might just be the best photo sharing app we have seen on Apple's phone. Thanks to a smart integration with the company's cloud storage and online gallery features, as well as some nice enhancements to the iPhone's own camera features, this free app looks like a clear winner to us.

There is clearly no dearth of slideshow services on the Internet. Some are intricate like Animoto, and others, like Slide, are mostly geared towards the MySpace and FaceBook crowd. PhotoPeach takes a more minimalist approach and focuses purely on the actual pictures without using flashy effects and themes. This is great if you just want to showcase some of your latest photos without the distraction of themes and sound effects.

Radar is a small but rapidly growing photo sharing site with a strong focus on mobile sharing. Radar has already developed applications for the Blackberry and T-Mobile Sidekick, as well as numerous other phones. Today, Radar also released its iPhone application (iTunes link), which is one of the better photo sharing and social networking apps we have seen for Apple's phone so far.

If you imagine a mashup of a micro-blogging site with a very pretty photo and video sharing service, with good privacy controls and an innovative user interface thrown in for good measure, you might come up with something akin to thisMoment. ThisMoment, which is still in private beta, is one of the prettier sites we have reviewed in the recent past. The idea behind thisMoment is that you can upload photos and videos from special moments in your life to the site, which then displays them in a beautiful user interface. The site, however, is flexible enough to also make it a very capable all-purpose photo and video micro-blogging service.

Given the constantly growing number of micro-blogging, photo sharing, and video hosting sites, it is getting harder and harder to keep all these accounts updated. One of our favorite application to post media files to a variety of services is Pixelpipe. Pixelpipe takes care of the distribution of your files, so that you can simultaneously post a picture to flickr and Facebook, and send a message with a link to that picture to Twitter. Thanks to a large number of updates in the last few weeks, Pixelpipe has become even more versatile than ever before and now lets you share almost any kind of file.

Today, Wuala, one of our Top 10 International Products of 2008, released a major update of its platform. Until today, you had to use Wuala's desktop application to use the service and access your files. Now, however, you can also use a web interface to access Wuala. Wuala also implemented an API that will allow developers to to hook into Wuala's storage services.

As we pointed out in our initial review of the service, Wuala uses the computers of other users to store a large part of the data on the service. Users who share a larger part of their hard drives are rewarded with more cloud storage.

Photo books are clearly one of the hot gifts this year, and web analytics firm Compete took a closer look at the state of this market today. According to Compete, traffic to all of the major photo printing sites like Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and MyPublisher rose in November, with Snapfish seeing over 25% more traffic compared to last November. While Snapfish gets most of its traffic from Yahoo and Google, the site that put it over the top was Oprah.com, which featured a coupon for a free photo book last month.

According to Flickr, its mobile site has seen a more than 50% increase in traffic over the last year. Today, Flickr is rolling out a new version of its mobile site, m.flickr.com, which not only updates the user interface in general, but also adds video playback to its already long list of features. Starting today, iPhone and iPod Touch owners will be able to make use of this feature and Flickr will roll out video playback for most other phones capable of supporting video streaming over the next couple of weeks.