"Waiter, there's a car on my gammon" - an image I shared with Twitpic yesterday.

When I was 16 I went on a school trip to France. It was a memorable time for me; it was the first time I’d been away from home without my parents and not been painfully homesick and the first school trip when I actually had fun. I took a lot of pictures while I was there and I really got the photography bug. I can remember returning home and vowing to take a picture every day for the rest of my life. Think about it, every day you’ll see something amusing, interesting or unusual that you’ll forget about quickly afterwards without the aid of a photograph.

This was in 1995 and due to the cost of film and non-existence of a cheap digital alternative my vow lasted about three days! These days most of us carry a camera of passable quality in our pocket every day as part of our mobile phone and I’ve recently renewed my vow to capture every ‘great little moment’ that I encounter. There are increasing numbers of ways of sharing these little moments with friends or the world, including a great new iPhone app that launched today and another service that’s on a major promotional drive.

12seconds.tv – Slideshows aren’t a compromise

I wrote about 12seconds a few weeks ago when it was a closed Alpha service and after a few hours of downtime today they’re back with their open-access Beta and a mobile app for the iPhone. Until now, 12seconds has mainly been about ‘video tweets’; a visual alternative to Twitter. The iPhone app opens up a whole new world of creative possibilities for the service. Constrained by the lack of video capture on Apple’s device, the app instead creates 12 second-long , 3 photo slideshows with an accompanying soundtrack that you can record after adding the photos.

Suddenly you can tell interesting, creative stories in no time at all. It may be a bit rubbish, but I created and uploaded this slideshow within a two minutes of downloading the app. I’ll be using this to create a review of the three most interesting photos I’ve taken each week but there’s potential for this to be used for comedy, marketing, online ‘alternate reality’ games and lots more besides. Most people will probably use it for quick sharing of “Wish you were here” messages to friends. It certainly is a powerful tool and well worth downloading.

ShoZu – not just for ninjas

ShoZu is a service that is built around capturing those little moments. To quote their marketing blurb: “Right now, thousands of ShoZu users are practising the Art of ShoZu and saving the world from lost moments. They are the Zu Fighters, a passionate, fun-loving, curious clan dedicated to getting pictures and videos off their phones and giving them homes“.

ShoZu runs on a wide variety of mobile phones and makes uploading photos and videos to online destinations as easy as a button press. Not content with supporting the ongoing Britglyph project, they’ve just launched a new campaign aimed at encouraging users to delve deeper into the service’s capabilities.

The ninja-themed ‘Zu Fighters’ campaign sees users earning points when they use different aspects of the service, from their updating social networking site status to adding feeds to inviting their friends to join ShoZu. The more points they earn, the higher their rank until they reach ‘Guru’ status at 10,000 points. Prizes are awarded for the most points earned each week so this may well encourage users share more.

Options, options, options…

There are lots of other options for quickly sharing online. Twitpic, for example, is great for quickly posting something you just have to share right now to your Twitter stream. Yesterday I was eating Christmas lunch at work and a plasic car fell out of a cracker onto my gammon. For some reason I just had to share the unusual image. In no time at all it was up on my Twitter stream.

So, there are lots of options for sharing moments. If you’re not already sharing there’s never been a better time to start.