Pixelpipe – Simultaneously Upload Your Media to 30+ Websites

Pixelpipe is a new service that enables you to mass distribute media. The concept itself is not new. Ping.fm did it for text (microblogging and status updates) and Hey!Spread and TubeMogul did it for videos. But Pixelpipe allows you distribute all forms of media across the web – Images, Videos as well as Audio Clippings. Indian readers will be interested in knowing that Pixelpipe also has an office in India (New Delhi) headed by Pixelpipe’s architect Jacob Jay.

Pixelpipe currently supports 32 Video/Image hosting services including Adobe Share, Box.net, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Imageshack, Imeem, Phanfare, Photobucket, Picasa, Smugmug, Vimeo, Webshots, Youtube and Zooomr in addition to supporting popular blogging services like Blogger, Live Journal, Typepad, Tumblr and Wordpress. You can also upload to your selfhosted blog or ftp account. One notable omission is Orkut – which is surprising considering that Pixelpipe has an office in India (where orkut is by far the most popular social networking destination). Many popular video sharing services are also missing, but the as far as image hosting services are concerned Pixelpipe’s list of supported services is exhaustive.

The web-interface is elegant, non-cluttered and easy to use. Once you add pipes (associate various services) uploading multimedia content is basically a matter of few clicks. I was pleased to see desktop clients available for Windows as well as Linux and Mac. Pixelpipe also supports Email/MMS upload and Nokia N-Series phones. Support for iPhone and Firefox extension is on its way. Pixelpipe doesn’t have an API yet (it’s coming soon), but developers can still take advantage of it because it supports Atom 0.3 and 1.0 standard, Flickr API and SMTP.

One major cause for worry with Pixelpipe is the missing TOS page. At the time of writing this article the TOS page was showing a 404 error. I would certainly like this to be fixed asap. It’s also worth pointing out that Pixelpipe stores a copy user’s uploads on Amazon’s S3.

While not everybody will need Pixelpipe and almost no one will use all the pipes offered by Pixelpipe, its certainly an extremely valuable resource to (lazy) folks like me who wish to maintain an updated album in multiple sites. Thanks to Pixelpipe I can keep my facebook, photobucket, zoomr and flickr account uptodate without any extra effort. Viral Video creators who are unwilling to pay for Hey!Spread would also find this useful. With complete Dataportability still being a distant dream, services like Pixelpipe are more than welcome.

Pixelpipe is currently in private beta. However, you can easily get invites from the places like ReadWriteWeb and Webware.