New online photo and location service Picplz, being developed by imeem execs Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg, is still far from being fully baked. But people who are determined to get an early look at the new service will soon have a way to do so – if they have an Android phone.
Think of picplz as a photo-based foursquare. You can use it as a simple publishing tool for a photo stream – think Twitpic or Posterous – but it really shines when you access the service via a mobile device. Picplz is integrated tightly with Foursquare to assign a location to your photo and then check in. Your photos are then published on the Picplz site and, optionally, Twitter. Facebook publishing is also coming soon.
The company has built an unpublished Android application as its first mobile app, which I tested earlier today. The app will be added to the Android marketplace sometime soon, and once it is anyone can download it and test the service. It will be the only way to actually create an active account on the service for now, but once you have an account you can use the picplz website as well.
It fills a huge hole in the Foursquare product, which doesn’t allow photo uploads.
The website has evolved significantly since we first wrote about picplz in April. One feature I like is the “infinite page” – which continues to load photos as you scroll down the page. There’s no concept of a “next” button, and you can scroll forever, or so I assume, when viewing the global feed of pictures.
The official launch of the company will be via an iPhone application later this year. The company is waiting for iPhone 4, says Caldwell. But until then, Android users welcome.
The company has a ridiculous amount of attention on it given the imeem background of the founders, and Caldwell is clearly trying to balance the need for people to test the service with the inevitable criticism that not-fully-baked services tend to receive. If you are a super early adopter type, understand that alpha software tends to have lots of bugs, and want to provide feature and interface feedback, you’ll want to try this out when it hits the Android Marketplace. The skeptics should wait a few months for the general release.
We’ll let you know as soon as the app is available.
(posted at 30,000 feet on Virgin America)
