Earlier this year, I discovered SplashBlog, a really nice mobile photo blogging client for PDAs. At the time, I thought:
A gave this application a quick test … and it looks like a great solution for mobile picture blogging. In fact, this could be a great moblogging application in general if they allowed posting without images. … Currently SplashBlog supports TypePad or SplashBlog.com sites, but promises to add support for more in the future. If support for standard XML-RPC / MetaWeblog API sites like MovableType and WordPress become available, this application could really take off.
It looks like the 2.0 release included significant software as well as business changes. Now the application is free (was about $20) and you get a free SplashBlog.com account good for 100 picture uploads. To use more, you subscribe to the Pro account for about $30/year.
I was hoping that other blog software (like MovableType, WordPress, Flickr, etc.) would be supported, but it looks like they are going to focus on their own online service. I checked with SplashData’s customer service to confirm; they replied:
That’s correct, we have stopped supporting TypePad since version 1.5,
because we found it impossible to add the features needed to grow SplashBlog
and still support 3rd party blogging.What we do offer now is a photogrid javascript feature, that allows you to
generate code to drop into your personal website: http://www.splashblog.com/portal_photogrid.aspx
I guess I can see the value in the SplashBlog-focused change and I have seen some nice mobile photo collaboration shown (at PalmSource conference, for example). But, if you want to capture a large number of users, supporting things like Flickr would seem to make sense. Maybe even at $20/copy, you can’t make a business out of selling Palm blogging software?
(Note: I was going to point to my SplashBlog account as an example, but their site is down at the moment.)
