Streamzoo a Fully Featured, Photo & Video Sharing Social Network
by Paul Wilks
Aug 19, 2011 7:35 AM –
Install
Streamzoo is a fully featured, photo-and-video-sharing social network that comes with photo enhancement functionality and a growing number of interactive users. Seemingly sat at the busy crossroads of Facebook, Twitter and Flickr; Streamzoo- much like picplz, harnesses some of the finer elements of these social networks into a comprehensive photo-sharing application.
Price: Free
Tested on: HTC Desire HD
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Exquisite photo enhancement options: filters, borders and tilt shift.
- Plush new UI
- Thriving online community.
- High quality photographs.
- Earn points for the pictures you submit.
- Geo-tagging and hash-tagging.
- Tapping the pictures mid-feed gives you a cool variety of options under the heading ‘What do you want to do?. These include viewing the photo, commenting, view users profile. Far more intuitive.
- Posted pictures frequently tell you the effects used.
Cons
- Occasionally the feeds are a little laggy, but this might be expected with high res pictures.
Features:
If a picture speaks a thousand words, in the world of short text messages and 140-character tweets, a picture-based social network makes perfect sense if you want to express yourself beyond the confines of these platforms. Streamzoo is an incredibly powerful service which not only allows you to post your photos directly from your phone, but also provides a host of photographic enhancements to tweak those snaps to perfection first.
Like some of the more established photography apps- like the brilliant Lightbox Photo‘s- Streamzoo firstly offers a series of gorgeous-looking filters to give your pics one of a variety of looks. Additionally you can add a border for your photo. Also, and this perhaps Streamzoo’s stand out here is the inclusion of tilt shifts, which create a professional and wholly focused look about your pictures in a number of different ways. These tools are all simple and fun to administer and make for an enjoyable user experience. With a recent update, the app also offers more advanced editing tools including: rotation, hue, saturation, brightness and contrast.
Once you are happy with your creation it’s time to post it online. When doing so you can give the pic a title, in addition to hashtags. These hashtags help define the picture into a category and contribute to the usefulness of the Streamzoo service. So, if you take a picture of your holiday in Barbados, you could add #barbados. Then your picture becomes immediately searchable in that hashtag stream. There are lots of streams to add your photos to if you choose, or create your own based on a hashtag. What is great here too is that it’s entirely searchable. If you perhaps plan to take your next holiday in say, Australia, you could search for #australia and find various user-taken pictures. This feature is great for exploring and following new people.
Comments and ‘Likes’ can also be added to pictures, and even after I had posted just a few pictures I found I had a number of likes, comments and new followers. It’s quite fair to say that this online community is already quite substantial and growing all the time. The other thing that stood out for me was the quality of photographs. It doesn’t take long to find some truly breathtaking shots in the streams. Interestingly too is the fact that for each like you get a point- so the more likes you get the more points you accumulate. There are daily, weekly and monthly leader boards for users who have the most popular pictures. This all contributes to a superbly connected online-environment that is constantly updating. Streamzoo therefore becomes more than just a social network for amateur photographers, there is tangible life to it.
With recent updates the user interface has been given more polish and is now far smoother. There are some cool and impressive transitional effects which leap from the screen and give the app a very polished feel. Streamzoo now feels far more easy to use and intuitive. The previous version of the app left me scratching my head a little to navigate effectively, but this is now even more of a joy to use. Viewing videos were occasionally tricky but this seems to have been overhauled and it is now very straightforward.
Watch on Mobile
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Streamzoo – New dashboard
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Streamzoo – New Effects
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Streamzoo – New Borders
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Streamzoo – New Advanced
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Streamzoo – New ‘Popular’ design
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Streamzoo – New ‘Activity’ design
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Streamzoo – New ‘Streams’ design
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Streamzoo – New ‘Leaderboard’ design
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Streamzoo – Variety of filters, borders and tilt shifts to apply
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Streamzoo – Film border
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Streamzoo – Fancy border
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Streamzoo – Tilt shifts are a great feature to the app
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Streamzoo – Popular
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Streamzoo – Pictures are presented very clearly
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Streamzoo – Like any other social network, pictures of cats are usually quite popular
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Streamzoo – Picture viewer
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Streamzoo – Expands photos, options to comment and like
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Streamzoo – Own photo view
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Streamzoo – Trending now in streams
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Streamzoo – The hashtags you use are saved for easy application later
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Streamzoo – The streams you follow
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Streamzoo – Invite friends
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Streamzoo – Streams currently trending
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Streamzoo – Personal uploads
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Streamzoo – Notifications
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Streamzoo – Leaderboard by day, week and month
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Streamzoo – Enter description, hashtags and sharing options
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Streamzoo – Feedback
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Streamzoo – More options in picture viewer
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Streamzoo – Settings
Usefulness:
Photo-sharing is arguably a growing social feature; Google+ has tried to make sharing pictures as easy as possible through it’s Android app, Twitter too has made it easier to post pictures to your stream and I have noted a flurry of new(ish) photo sharing apps on the Android Market- most notably LiveShare, Lightbox Photos and EyeEm.
Ease of Use:
There are lot of features contained within Streamzoo but they are easily accessible and easy to use. It might seem a bit overwhelming at first. I wasn’t expecting the app to be quite as powerful and feature rich, but with the new UI it’s fun to play with and experiment.
Frequently Used:
Like any social network this depends very much on the user. But I enjoy taking pictures and exploring others photos so I have found myself using Streamzoo several times per week.
Interface:
The interface is very functional, well designed and responsive. I have found other applications which are perhaps richer, such as Lightbox Photos, but then these lack the level of functionality Streamzoo offers.