The Kodak EasyShare M590 may be the latest compact to own such short-lived titles as the thinnest 5x optical zoom camera in the world, but it's the sharing and social credentials it possesses that will stand the test of time.

Yes, there's a 14-megapixel sensor, a 2.7-inch ambient light sensing LCD and more scene modes than you can shake an old roll of 35mm at, but the interesting part is a share button which offers easy uploads to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the Kodak Gallery and any email address you like as well - with more networks such as Twitter and the like expected soon.

The deal is that you take a bunch of photos, select the ones you want to keep, hit the Share button and up pops a screen allowing you to choose which sites you want to put them on. Sadly, there's no on-board Wi-Fi but the minute you plug them into your computer, the software takes over and automatically uploads each one exactly where they're supposed to be.

Unfortunately, Kodak can't legislate for all the other software out there on all the other photo and video services, so you still have to go in and manually tag them, unless using the Kodak Gallery, but, all the same, it shaves off some precious time.

"We're not saying that taking a photo from a normal camera and putting it onto Facebook is much of a problem", said a Kodak spokesman, "but when you want to put some in one place, a few in another and the same image to Flickr, Facebook and 10 email addresses, then the EasyShare system is going to save you a lot of time".

For £169.99, it certainly seems like plenty to play with once you throw in the clarity afforded by the Schneider-Kruznach optics, but one can't help wondering if and when Wi-Fi and maybe even 3G will be added in to make the uploads instant. On top of that, the camera can already recognise faces and you can program in who each one is. Once that can be paired up with Zuckerberg's system, then that's instant tagging as well.