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Twango, a great sharing site that nobody uses

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
Rafe Needleman
2 min read

Twango is a nicely put-together media sharing site. It's somewhat unusual in that it's not focused on a particular media type, like YouTube is for video and Flickr is for photos. Rather, you can upload any file into Twango -- video, photo, music, even documents like PDF files. For each file you get a YouTube-like page where others can comment on it.

Twango also has a clever organizational structure. In addition to letting you put keywords on files, you can also put any file into a "channel." Channels are simply collections of files. You can have a family channel, a funny channel, and so on. What's cool is that you can put the same file in multiple channels, and each channel gets its own simple URL. Users can also add their own files to another user's channel (if the channel owner allows it), which makes channels useful for groups; you could set up a site for a group of travelers to collect all their trip photos. (Yes, you could also do this with Flickr and tags, but this is really much simpler.)

The service also has very flexible upload tools. You can upload using a Java-based drag-and-drop window, a downloadable Windows application, or directly via email (each channel even gets its own address).

The site is free (for now) and everybody gets unlimited storage. The catch is that you can only upload 250MB a month.

Twango does not display all media in its own Web pages -- I found that some audio, video, and document files opened up in their native applications instead of being played or displayed inside the browser. But that's about the only technological flaw I could find.

I like Twango. It's a clean sharing system that's easy to use and very flexible. It is also, however, one of way too many sharing sites, and it doesn't have nearly the juice of a top site like YouTube. If you want your media to be discovered by the masses, it's not the site for you. If you want to share your videos and photos with friends and family, though, it's a decent choice.