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Zannel is a new player in the microblogging and mobile social networking arena. Their service combines mobile status updates ala Twitter with mobile photo and video sharing. Updates of your friends can be viewed either on your phone or on Zannel’s web site. The company describes its service as “Instant Media Messaging” in that each piece of multimedia content posted can start a conversation either via the Web or through your mobile.
On the Web site, each piece of content has familiar features like the ability to embed it elsewhere, email it to a friend, or leave a comment. The site also has search functionality so you can look for users or multimedia about a specific topic. One issue readily apparently when viewing videos is the quality that is often lost when sending a video from mobile to the Web.
Zannel plans to launch a widget later this month so your updates can be shared on your blog and social networking profiles. For now, the site is a well-designed multimedia version of Twitter with a very standard set of social networking and viral tools. Yappd is another site adding a multimedia layer to microblogging, though their service only offers text and images, whereas Zannel has added the video element.