iBeam.it Tries To Make Holiday Photo-Sharing Easier

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Sharing your holiday photos is always a pain, and e-mail is usually the “answer.” Mom wants the pictures in her Facebook, your smart sister wants them in her Dropbox, and her stupid hippie boyfriend wants them on paper, because bits are like, so ephemeral, man.

IBeam.it is a service that promises to make this easy, by letting you share photos from any service you like, and letting the recipient pick where they receive them. Sadly. it looks like a no-go.

When a jaded (and resolutely non-hungover) tech writer has trouble working out how to use a website designed for friends and family, then the alarm bells should start to jingle. And so it is with the iBeam.it site.

The service is like a focussed version of IFTTT, the Internet Glue™ service. You give it access to your various accounts (Dropbox, Google Drive, Instagram) and, when you share a photo, it’ll contact your recipient with a link to iBeam.it, whereupon they will become instantly confused.

You see they’ll need to give the service access to their account in order to receive the photos. Once done, things should be pretty smooth, but as the site’s big pitch is that you can share photos with family and friends without making them sign up for a new app, it seems a little ass-backward.

I’m still annoyed that Shared Photo Streams don’t work on the iPad 1 I gave to my mother this year, as that allows for truly seamless sharing. As it is, I’ll probably just stick with email, or use the amazing Unbound app to share the photos’ Dropbox links. The rest is a problem for the recipients.

And your sister’s retro-grouch boyfriend? Screw him, the dirty hippie. And tell him to go take a shower already.

Source: iBeam.it

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