The Pitch

While established photo sharing sites already exist, Yogile is different because it lets multiple people contribute with ease. Once you create an album, you get a customizable URL and e-mail address to share with anyone who wants to add photos, either as e-mail attachments or uploads through the site. There’s no need for these users to register, keeping the process simple and hassle-free.

Take a wedding, for example. Dozens of attendees take their own photos, all from different cameras and angles. While you might try asking everyone for their shots afterward, Yogile offers a smart alternative.

There are many photo sites out there for where you can upload photos and share the URL with your friends and family but Yogile takes this idea a step further and enables anyone to be able to contribute their pictures to a public or private photo album.

It Works!
You can upload pictures in three ways, via the web, via email or via MMS. The last two options are done via a unique email address which uses the name of your photo album URL. When you upload a photo via email the Subject line is the title of your image while I can only guess that any text in the body of your email would be the image description. Submitting an email via MMS also works wonderfully but any text included in the MMS will not get used at the image title nor for an image description but those can be added/edited via the web. You have the option, as the album creator, to receive notifications of new photos added to your albums and the nice part is that the email comes with image previews which is much better than a new image message with a link to your album.

Personalize It!
After I uploaded images via the web, email and MMS I thought back to the example that Yogile spoke about, a wedding, and how this site could be useful.

Imagine being able to give all your wedding guests an email address and URL and all of your photos would be in one location. No need to have photos spread across multiple sharing sites or going around tagging people so that they would know where to see their pics you have access to one central location for all your pics!! There’s only one issue that I could see…the automatic URL when you first register is just some random characters (mine was yt8colz) and putting this string of characters in print would be rather ugly and telling all your guests these characters would result in no one remembering the email/URL. I thought it would be great if you were able to customize the email/URL and when I went to create a private photo album I learned that you could actually name your own photo album! By being able to name your own album you also end up creating a custom submission email and a custom Yogile URL, perfect!

It Could Break!
When I created my account on Yogile it automatically created an album along with an email that I could use to submit photos to, this album was yt8colz with an email address of yt8colz@yogile.com. When I discovered you could create custom album names I went back and edited the first album that was created with a custom name of GabeDiaz. So my public album could now be found at yogile.com/gabediaz and you can email pics to gabediaz@yogile.com but what happens to yogile.com/yt8colz and yt8colz@yogile.com? Well visiting my original URL yogile.com/yt8colz results in a page not found and sending emails to the original email of yt8colz@yogile.com disappeared into the internet without any bounce-back email…not good.

This issue of renaming your albums could cause issues if an excited user creates an account and starts to send out the email address to all of his/her friends for submissions and then later edits the name of the folder. Can a person’s URL be assigned to someone else or can a person switch back? I’m actually a little surprised that Yogile doesn’t forward or associate your old URL with your custom one.

Overall
Yogile is a site that simplifies group photo sharing and although there could be issues, specifically with the name changing of your own albums, the site works like a charm. Yes there are other sites out there which offer group photo sharing; with one that specifically that comes to mind, Posterous, but Yogile allows you to create an email to share with your group to upload to versus having to add others via their email address’. Think back to the wedding example, it’s much easier to give your wedding guests a single email to submit to versus trying to collect everyone’s email address and then adding them to your photo sharing site. Let’s be honest not everyone wants to register to a new service in order to submit pictures, so the email feature from Yogile is great and I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar gets rolled out to your favorite photo sites or if the Yogile team gets acquired and integrated into a larger photo site.

Participate
As you saw above my submission email is
gabediaz@yogile.com and my public album is yogile.com/gabediaz feel free to submit any pictures!

Disclosure
For anyone who comes across this post I just want to let you know that I was made aware of Yogile and it’s service by one of their team members. The above is my honest opinion upon first using the site. Unless otherwise noted by a Disclosure statement all of my other “First Impressions” are based on products that I personally use or come across.

Have something you want me to look at to share with my readers? My contact information is above and to the right, cheers!

Early last week Chase released an update to their Chase iPhone App in which it rolled out several new features including a QuickPay Service along with being able to deposit checks to your account via your phone. Snapping a pic of your check and depositing it to your account is not ground breaking technology but I believe Chase is the first major US bank to offer it. Lucky for me I have a Chase account and last week I had a check that was sitting in an envelope in my back pocket which needed to be deposited.

In order to deposit a check via the Chase mobile iPhone app is an internet connection and a well lit area, stipulations for depositing via Chase Mobile is that you are only allowed to deposit a maximum of $1000 a day and $3000 a week. The app requires you to choose an account to deposit to, a deposit amount and then to take a picture of your check via the app and once it’s done will display the checks relevant information on your phone. Truthfully it took me 3 times to get this to work as the app wasn’t able to read the check properly.

1st Attempt
My first attempt resulted in the app reading the correct amount to deposit(it verifies the deposit amount) but had issues reading the account number on the check, although it did read the routing number fine. I was asked to type in the routing number in the missing field but I figured I’d try again to see if it was an issue with how I took the photo.

2nd Attempt
My second started out a little differently. The Chase app asks you to take the photo of your check from an overhead position. On my first attempt I did as such but because I was overhead and taking the picture in my office, the lights from the ceiling cast a little bit of a shadow from my head, throw in a slight glare from the fluorescent lights and I now understood why the app couldn’t read all of the information. So for my second shot I moved from underneath the ceiling lights and positioned the phone to an overhead position but made sure to stand aside so that my head didn’t cast any shadow at all. Once the front and back shots were taken the app did it’s magic and tried to read the information on the check. Luckily this time it read the account number and the routing number but it told me it couldn’t verify the deposit amount…the app read the check as having a $0.00 value!! This was not good so I shut down the app and tried again.

3rd Attempt
I knew what I had to do for the 3rd time around. I needed no glare from the lights, no shadow from my head and just to make sure the app read everything correctly I made sure the check was evenly flat, after being in a folded envelope, by doing the drag the check along the corner of your desk trick. I guess there’s a reason they say “third times the charm” because this time the Chase iPhone app worked as expected by verifying and reading the deposit amount, account number and routing number all by the picture taken by my iPhone. Once you have all your information displayed properly on your phone you are able to submit the deposit to your account. You then get taken to a verification screen which acts as your confirmation and since you already in the app you can quickly go to your account and see the status of your deposit.

Total time taken for depositing a check via the app was less than 10 mins although if I hadn’t run into issues would probably have taken 3-5 mins. The total time for the check to clear and get credited to my account was less than 24 hours, not sure if this is the norm but I’m guessing deposit time will vary and it will not be instant availability as it has to be reviewed. After using the Chase Mobile app successfully I can now say that if I ever have a check that falls under the deposit requirements of the app I will definitely think twice about getting into the car and driving to the nearest bank. The hard part for me is over; I deposited a check for $900 via my phone, it was a large amount to use as a test amount and believe me I was scared of something going wrong but in the end it worked out and it saved me around 20 mins by not having to leave the office. So if you’re apprehensive about depositing a check via your phone, don’t be…it actually works.

Today Facebook announced a slew of new social plugins that anyone can add to their web pages to make them more social. Among these new plugins is a new button to “Like” anything on the web.

There are 2 main versions of the Like button

The basic Like button is available via a simple iframe you can drop into your page easily. A fuller-featured Like button is available via the XFBML tag and requires you use the JavaScript SDK. The XFBML version allows users to add a comment to their like as it is posted back to Facebook.

The Facebook Like Button comes with a handy generator with several options for outputting the proper code to add the Like Button to any web page. This is fine and dandy for some sites/pages and only needs a little tweeking to add the button to your WordPress posts.

The Basic WordPress Code
The only thing needed to add the Facebook Like button to your WordPress posts is to include the proper code for your permalinks. Basically you add the WordPress the_permalink() code to the href= to get the following:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=<?php the_permalink() ?>"
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

The above adds a 450px wide by 80px high box on your site that is ready to display thumbnails of every friend that has also liked the site/page. If you noticed in the Facebook Like Button generator there are several options for turning off thumbnails, changing font and even using a button count counter. You can append any of these settings after the URL in order to change the look of your button.

Editing the Facebook Like Button
Let’s add the following to change the options to the Facebook button, here we are changing to the count view, hiding thumbnails as well as changing the width and height. We will add the following the code above, after the permalink and before closing out the double quotes.

Add this to the above basic code:

%2F&layout=button_count&show-faces=false&width=100&action=like&colorscheme=light

End up with a new style button:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=<?php the_permalink() ?>%2F&amp;layout=button_count&amp;show-faces=false&amp;width=100&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light"
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; width:100px; height:20px"></iframe>

This is the simple version, for a detailed button that integrates deep with Facebooks new social graph you will need to use the Javascript SDK version of the Like Button.

You can see an example of the iframe Facebook Like button below, if you are signed into Facebook and are reading this feel free to test it out!

With Google Buzz being the talk of the week it’s no surprise that alot of sites created their own Share on Buzz buttons which function similar to the ReTweet and Facebook Share buttons. There’s even a WordPress Plugin that’s been released along with many tutorials online of how to add the proper code to enable your posts to be shared on Buzz.

There’s no official Share on Buzz button nor do the current buttons share directly on Buzz but the buttons enable you to post an item to your Google Reader, in which you can add it your shared items. Google Buzz has the option to import your shared items from Google Reader so the workflow goes as follows:
Google Reader > Shared Items > Google Buzz
Simple and effective yet alot of the code that I’ve seen around the web forces you to either leave the page you are on or opens the Add to Reader in a new page, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Share on Google Buzz Popup Code

<a href='javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain=&quot;http://www.google.com&quot;;if(b&amp;&amp;!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement(&quot;script&quot;));void(z.src=&quot;http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js&quot;);void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}'>
<img src="IMAGE.JPG" border="0" alt="Share on Google Buzz"/></a>

All you need to do is insert the above code in your Single.php file and replace IMAGE.JPG with the Buzz Logo of choice. There’s a nice Buzz logo psd file on DeviantArt by =Zadong and there are also several Buzz Share buttons over at ChethStudios. I decided to go the compact button route and ended up creating my own button which you can save and use if you please.

If you use the code above, the compact button or if you used a different technique to add a Buzz Share button to your site leave a comment and let me know, would love to see how people are implementing a Google Buzz share button. Also, if you are on Google Buzz leave a comment with a link to your profile so others can follow you and if you wish to follow me on Google Buzz just visit my Google Profile.