Twango Review

Earlier this week I had a chance to meet with Randy Kerr. Randy is the co-founder of Twango, a place to share and save your photos, videos and audio files. Twango is a lot more than just your average sharing site.

My first reaction is that Twango is designed very well and the usability is top notch and is stronger than Flickr or YouTube. It’s smooth and they really have polished the edges whereas I feel like Flickr is missing that polish. It is rare that I review a site that has such a welcoming design.

The full launch was in October 2006 and they are reporting a 50% month-over-month growth in membership. The Twango tagline is, “Many Ways In, Many Ways Out” and what they essentially mean is that you can put in files by email, camera phone, webcam or pc/mac and you can share your files via RSS, iTunes, blogs, social networks, etc. They support more than 100 formats including pdf, Microsoft Office, etc.

I think Twango works well for the mainstream user. While I doubt my mother could easily navigate through Flickr, she could navigate through Twango. For example they use the term keywords instead of tags. In fact, I have already setup a channel for her so she can see the files I want her to see. Channels are a way to share files across different mediums. You can put images, videos, pdf, documents into a channel and then setup security for that channel. You can also make the channel public for anyone to view.

There is a mobile site and Randy let me know that this is an area they plan to work on heavily throughout 2007.

The question I had for Randy was about how they plan to monetize the app. They are self-funded and are founded by five ex-Microsoft employees. They currently sell photos and other products from the photos you upload. They are looking at offering a premium service which will have a larger upload allowance and no advertising. The free account will have some advertising in the near future.

My concern with Twango is whether they will be able to sustain their growth rate into 2007 and more importantly will they be able to compete with the marketing machines that are Google and Yahoo!. Clearly YouTube can outspend almost anyone and I am pretty sure YouTube will use the P&G way of beating the competition… that is outspend vs. innovate.

If you haven’t tried Twango, I suggest you give it a try. I am not sure it will replace YouTube or Flickr for the techie set but is a nice complement and might work for your non-tech friends and family.