Twango, a small social media site based in Redmond, WA (which we have been using to upload and share the audio interviews we do here), has been bought by Nokia, for a reported sum of about $96.8 million, WSJ reports. The site allows users to share online audio, video, text, photos and other kinds of files, an all-in-one file sharing service. It was founded in 2004 by five former Microsoft senior managers and has 10 employees. Nokia is likely to rebrand the Twango service and incorporate software into its phones to ease sending content between phones and online.

This is Nokia’s third digital media related acquisition in the last year since Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo took charge: digital-music distributor Loudeye for $60 million and a small German navigation-software company called gate5 for an undisclosed price. Nokia has existing media sharing tieups with Flickr and SixApart’s Vox,, but it plans to continue these relationships in order to provide choice for customers.

Carlo over at Mobhappy has a good preliminary analysis of this deal: “I’m just not convinced that Nokia needs to get into the business of running web services in areas where plenty of established competition exists—and consumers have overwhelmingly chosen that competition. I’m interested to see what Nokia can bring to the table by snapping up Twango, but I hope it doesn’t come at the expense of the continued development of tools to let consumers share their mobile media to a wide range of sites.”

SeattlePI: Gerard Wiener, VP of multimedia mergers and acquisitions at Nokia, said he kicked the tires on about 75 other photo and video services before choosing Twango. Some use casse scenarios after integration: A Nokia phone user, for example, could snap photos or videos while at a sporting event and have those images integrated with one’s personal online photo collection at Twango’s Web site. It also works the other way, so mobile phone users who wanted to access images from the PC could do so from their phone. More details in release and FAQs.