Pickle is another new tool for the anti-Flickr crowd - those who want to share photos and videos with friends, but don't want the whole world to see. They're doing that by enhancing a traditional medium: email. The core offering is a service that makes it easy to upload your photos and videos and email them to your friends - Pickle compresses the files to a reasonable size and allows you to customize the appearance of the email using html templates.
Each user also has a PickleBox - a unique "@pickle.com" email address that can be used to upload your media. Any attachments will be uploaded to your account, and you're free to share the address with friends. Pickle also allows users to create widgets (yep, feeding the MySpace beast) and quickly insert video clips and photos on Blogger, LiveJournal and Typepad. The free version allows you to upload up to 200MB per month, while the paid version (currently $19.95/year) takes that limit up to 2GB.
The design isn't as intuitive as Flickr, and it's hard to imagine the early adopters embracing Pickle anytime soon. As a result, the target market will likely be the less tech-savvy demographic who stay away from blogs and social networks. Unfortunately, that's also the hardest demographic to reach.
