I recently decided that I needed to find a more efficient way to take photos from my gigs and post them to my website because, to be perfectly honest, I just wasn’t finding the time to do it and considering that web promotion is my business that just makes me look really bad! I figured that there had to be some kind of widget out there that would let me at least only post them in one place while feeding them everywhere else. I have been playing around in facebook lately comparing groups to pages and exploring the nuances of integrating facebook into my marketing strategy so that seemed like a good place to start.

Facebook has a great photo album feature that lets you upload photos into as many albums as you like and integrates a very nice tagging system which is excellent for the viral marketing end of the equation. In fact, they even have a mobile upload feature that lets you take pictures with your MMS enabled phone and upload them in real time to your facebook page - nice! All you have to do is send a photo email to facebook mobile, receive an activation code back by email and voila, you have an active mobile photo account. I followed all the instructions over and over and constantly received the message that my phone or provider was not able to provide this function and that no photo was received. I have a brand new Palm Treo 700p and would be pretty surprised if it didn’t have the capacity to perform this function.

Long story short I had many conversations with Palm and with Telus who both blamed each other. I finally contacted facebook support and a great thing happened - I actually got to communicate with some real people who not only understood my problem and appreciated it, but ones who were able to and did fix it! Hooray for facebook customer support especially Carter, Lawrence and most notably, Mark Slee http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark_Slee/204686 .

Mark actually took a good look at the problem and wrote to me that:

1/ Your mobile email provider doesn’t send via a normal Telus MMS (multimedia messaging service) gateway. Rather, it seems to use a service provided by a 3rd party called VistoMobile, which we’ve just added support for.

2/ Email messages use MIME types to specify what type of data they are sending. Standard webpages have a MIME type of text/html, and normal pictures are sent with a MIME type of image/jpg or image/gif. However, my email provider (Telus) sends the image with a MIME type application/octet-stream. We modified our software to detect when there’s an image being sent as this type — but perhaps not surprisingly this MIME type wasn’t something we initially thought to add support for over the far more standard “image” MIME types.

Now that’s what I call service! Along the way I did try some third-party facebook apps to deal with my mobile photo uploads and they all worked but they didn’t enter the facebook news feed the way the native plugin does and they didn’t offer an option for me to pull those photos directly into my web page/blog.

So, now I have a facebook mobile photo album which can be seen on my personal profile and, thanks to the Fotobook Wordpress plugin (http://www.aaronharp.com/dev/wp-fotobook/) I can pull any or all of my photo albums onto my wordpress site (http://www.tellmama.net/blog/photos/mobile-uploads/)

Now all I need is the ability to also pull those photos onto my facebook band page (which is taking a long time to populate because, well, I don’t have any spare time) and the functionality for fotobook to automatically populate my blog site photo section with my mobile uploads. Apparently, facebook pages are unable to share photos with personal facebook sites automatically (I find this strange and hope that somebody will design a solution soon). Oh yes, one more thing, I would really like to be able to upload mobile photos to more than one photo album or site. At this time you can only register your cell number to one personal facebook mobile album.

I have to say that even though there are some gaps, the facebook mobile photo upload tool is a great addition to the facebook portfolio of tools and gizmos and the actual customer support by real people is a genuine welcome surprise. Tell your friends!