From Paul Gil,
Your Guide to Internet for Beginners.
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A. Fliqz is a new web service for sharing home movies with friends and family. Instead of trying to email cumbersome MPG and AVI files to your motorcycle club or your sister in Wellington, Fliqz lets you store movies in compressed format on their servers.

No, Fliqz.com is different from YouTube.com. While YouTube is a broadcast site that lets you display your novelty videos to the world, Fliqz is much more specialized and mature. Fliqz.com lets you selectively choose who gets to see your videos.

Indeed, like a secure extranet, Fliqz.com lets you control who gets to see your video library. As a Fliqz member, you are given three levels of publishing access: public (anyone can see your videos), private (an invitation-only format), and private with password (invitation-only plus padlock). As of July 2006, Fliqz is the only service of this kind on the Net.

Technical Info about Fliqz:

• There is no limit to your video library size... you can store literally hundreds of videos, if you wish.
• Each single movie must be 100MB or less when you upload it through the Web.
• Optional FTP access is available upon request if you wish to upload larger videos.
• Movies are compressed and converted to Flash .flv format, effectively shrinking them to one-tenth their original size.

Pros about Fliqz.com:

• The user interface is very clean and user-friendly for beginners.
• Navigation and uploading is easy.
• Viewing movies is quick; the videos load much faster than YouTube.com.
• You control who gets to see your videos.
• FTP access is available if you wish to upload files larger than 100MB.
• Because it is an advertising-driven service, there is no cost to become a Fliqz.com member.

Cons about Fliqz.com:

• 100MB is easy to exceed when you are an amateur videographer.
• Shrinking your movies before upload requires you to knowledgeable in Windows Movie Maker or other video editing tool.
• You cannot set an individual user's password.
• You must be careful not to click "back" on your browser while your movies are uploading.

Overall:

Despite some small flaws, Fliqz.com is an excellent new video sharing service. While the juvenile world flocks to YouTube.com for a coffee break laugh, Fliqz is a service for the rest of us grown-ups. If you have that video of your daughter's first steps, your buddy's first skydive, or yourself in motorcycle class, then Fliqz.com is the place to share it with your loved ones.

Visit Fliqz.com here.