Jive.ly is a new app in full beta, billing itself as a Twitter-like site for mobile. Created by UK-based developer Martin Buhr, the app is designed as a place to update your social network accounts with images and videos from a mobile without having to hook up third party services like Twitpic.
It enables quick, simple posting of video, images and text to your user feed from any mobile device via email or MMS with twitter-like replies, hashtags and trending. In other words it’s quite like Twitter, but this does MMS and video as the site will auto-embed content from Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr and other web sites from posted links and synchronise with your Twitter and Tumblr accounts. Or just post plain text if you like. You can also set up notifications for search terms you are interested in and then have it notify you via mobile. The service also has an API. Here’s my profile.
Buhr wanted to be able to just post videos straight to the web and although it’s possible to do this with Youtube, that won’t update a Twitter or Facebook status with the new media – jive.ly can. He calls it “Twitter, without the $55 million price tag ;-).”
Business model-wise Buhr says Jive.ly will offer white-label accounts to businesses that want to have live-media on their own sites for a fee, using the site API (for example News organisations that want instant UGC with little to no development or server costs on their end); “single tweet” advertising and content-licensing. Buhr is looking for funding.
If there are comparisons to be made you might compare it to Utterli or the now defunct Jaiku or perhaps Moblog.net (though the latter does not have the ‘follow’ model of Twitter). However, all of those are a lot longer in the tooth and are wrapped in, shall we say, a much better design.