No more ShoZu for me?

Hello!

Some of you may have noticed that my previous mobile posts were done with ShoZu... but not anymore. What has happened? Well, ShoZu went from making their application free-to-download to pay-per-download.

Not only did they do this without much warning ahead... but also, previous users weren't told either.

What happened to me is that I updated my phone's firmware and lost all the apps (thanks to Nokia for that - E71 loses all memory on upgrade, at least the 5800 XpressMusic retains its brains!). When I tried to download it again, I couldn't find a direct download link on ShoZu's web site. Rather, it pointed to Ovi Store which says it's not available in my country. I an lucky to work in an international company, so I used the corporate VPN and told Ovi Store for a moment that I was logging in from USA and UK. That worked... but I discovered that you now have to pay for the application. Application that I *ALREADY AM A USER OF*.

Of course, I've immediately stopped using it, stopped recommending it to my friends, and, in fact, suggest everybody move to Pixelpipe. This is a really cool application. It can post media to all the sites I used to post to via ShoZu, but it integrates directly in the Nokia Ovi Share application. I don't need ShoZu's geo-tagging as Nokia Location Tagger does that on the E71... and on my XpressMusic 5800 with the latest v30.XX firmware, the camera directly geotags the application.

I just miss posting to Twitter, Facebook and a few more. But that I've solved with things like aka-aki (a cool social networking application), Tweets60 (you guess what it does) and Nokia's own Facebook shortcut directly in my 5800 XpressMusic. I will also try Snaptu and Pocket Life which look like cool, free, alternatives!

Through a very bad tactical move (I'm not sure I see a properly defined strategy there) ShoZu has lost several customers thus, and gained negative comments everywhere I see. Pity.