Cooliris Redesigns LiveShare for Mobile and Web

A few days ago Cooliris announced the launch of its redesigned LiveShare service. With the LiveShare app, users can send messages, post photos and photo collages, or share your location. Billed as ‘beautiful messaging for mobile and web’ the service presents photos in a smart-looking layout, and you can add messages or location too if you like. The app is capable of batch photo uploads [1], which is pretty handy as well.

Personally, it took me a little while to wrap my head around exactly what LiveShare was trying to do with this app – after all, it does many things, and I couldn’t really see any potential problem that this was solving, at least not for me. But admittedly I’m a little picky and somewhat minimalist with the services I adopt.

While there’s certainly lots of overlap between the functions of LiveShare and other social sharing services (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Path, etc) one interesting feature of LiveShare is that it lets you share with other people who don’t have the app installed, as long as they have an email address or a US phone number [2]. While I wouldn’t make use of this feature, I expect someone of an older generation might appreciate this, as they’re likely to have friends who adopt slowly to new social networks [3]. On this point, Cooliris’s APAC director, Derek Tan, tells us:

We still see people communicating outside of Facebook as family members may not be on it. Also, on Facebook a communication among a smaller group that includes different elements like text, photos and locations is still very broken. So, unlike any other app out there instead of siloing text messaging, photo sharing and other communication features, the all-new LiveShare is built from the ground up to seamlessly combine these elements into a visually exciting experience across mobile and web for consumers who value speed and beauty.

For those who already have a wide network on Facebook, you can login with those credentials and post directly to the social network from the LiveShare app.

We’ve written about the service before, and its capabilities for allowing groups of people to contribute to a single photo collection, which can be very useful for event coverage. While that function is still in the web version of LiveShare, it’s not in the current mobile version – although I’m told “there are thoughts” that it might be added soon.

In any case, don’t hesitate to give it a try to see if it’s a good fit for you. You can download it from the iTunes Store. Check out their demo video below: