December 18, 2006 • 6:56 pm 6
Hey Twitterers! Our vod:pod three-step now works with Twitter.
All you need is to start a Pod, and then put the del.icio.us-like “I’m Watching” button on your browser. It just takes seconds to get set up.
Next time you see a video on YouTube or dozens of other video sharing sites, just click the “I’m watching” button. With that one click you’ll:
1. Add it to your Pod.
2. Add it to your blog (if you have a vod:pod widget on your blog).
3. And, drumroll please, send a Twitter message to your Twitter friends if you use the “I loved it” or “LOL’d” emoticons (you should only tell your friends about the really good stuff, right?).
To enable vod:pod to work with your Twitter account, just go to your vod:pod profile page (click on your name at the top right), click “Edit Profile” and sign in with your Twitter username and password (so we can send the messages through the Twitter API).
It’s, um, very beta-ish. We hope it’s a fun addition to the fun you’re already having on Twitter. If you enable this, judicious use of the “LOL’d” and “Love it” emoticons is best, so you don’t spam your Twitter friends. We’d love your input on how to make it better.
Filed under: News, Publishing Tools , How VodPod Works
December 15, 2006 • 3:12 pm 1
Texas is home to the famed 2-step. We’ve got the 3-step, and it goes like this:
1. You see a video on a site like YouTube, Google video, MySpace, or Metacafe and think: “I want my friends to see this.”
2. You click our “I’m Watching” button on your browser, and if you want, tell people you laughed out loud, loved it, or just watched the video.
3. It goes into your pod with that click, and your friends will see that you’ve seen it.
No hokey-pokey, that.
You can get set up to do our vod:pod three-step in seconds. Just start a pod (about 30 seconds if you’re a slow typist), put the “I’m Watching” button on your browser (literally 5 seconds or less on Firefox and Safari), and invite your friends to your Pod.
With this simple combination, your browsing serendipity is your friends’ viewing pleasure (we’re assuming you have good taste, at least in the eyes of those who know you). You watch, you click if like it, and it’s in your Pod. And your friends know about it if they know about your Pod. Oh, and if you only want your friends to see, you can make your Pod private. Then only those you invite will be able to get in.
For extra credit, you can also let them know through your blog with our nifty widgets. Videos that you put in your Pod simultaneously show up on your blog widget, for your friends to watch there. Automagically.
Those of you in the really advanced class can point your friends to the RSS feed for your Pod. They’ll see whenever you’ve add a video to your Pod through their feedreaders.
We’ll have more ways to use your Pod to tell your friends what you’re watching in the coming weeks. Let us know what you’d like to see.
Filed under: Tips, Tricks, Hacks , How VodPod Works
December 8, 2006 • 6:09 pm 0
We’ve made some quick but nifty changes to our video player page in the past day.
So what’s changed?
We think the player is a lot nicer and easier to use, we hope you agree. Let us know what you think!
Filed under: News , How VodPod Works
December 7, 2006 • 8:08 pm 0
Since we opened our doors a couple of days ago, well over one hundred new pods have been started.
We wanted to highlight a few.
Michael Feger’s Spinal Cord Injury pod impresses. It’s a great example of someone who has built a Pod for a community of people with similar interests; and Michael’s pod is also obviously for a very good cause.
Member Philapple has started the Apple pod, flush with videos that will make you Apple fan boys glow with excitement (especially with the holidays approaching!).
Philapple has also started the lovel Scarlett Johanssen pod, very nice.
Filmmaker and writer Lance Weiler has created a pod for his movie Head Trauma — it looks really scary.
He’s been especially nice to put a hi-res version of his trailer up (so you can put it on your iPod if you want) as well as some shorter, hi-res clips. Worth a look, but we don’t recommend watching while you’re alone in your home, at night!
Indie Musica is a great music video pod from Cedmax. We’re enjoying the videos there quite a bit. It shows you how friends can put together a collection of videos to watch with their friends.
There are quite a few podders (couldn’t resist, it may become an officially sanctioned term) who have started personal pods. Check out Chris Lee, Von Noodles, Webcruiser, and Mal Burns. We didn’t necessarily plan it this way, but it seems like one of the things vod:pod does well is to provide a way to tell your friends what to watch, and what you’re watching. We’ll be making changes that make this easier, more fun, and more obvious in the coming days.
Finally, we should point out that some great pods have been started by early testers of the service in October and November. These include the Birds’n'Wildlife pod by Aviceda, the related Australian Birds pod from birdinggreynomads, and the unicyclist pod started by klownlife. Do check them out!
Filed under: Stuff We Love
December 6, 2006 • 6:54 pm 2
Since we opened up our doors to the public.
As we expected, a lot of people have come just to have a drive-by look-see. But many have created and started building out cool pods, more than we have expected. I think about 120-130 new pods have been created in just the past two days. I’ll talk about a few of them in another post shortly.
We’ve tried to be in touch with almost every one of the 230 new users who’ve come onto the service in the last 48 hours, and we’ve gotten back great notes from a lot of you. Keep it coming, we really want to hear from all of you who’ve created a Pod or just tried the service.
We’ve read good writeups from bloggers around the web. Since we don’t have a fancy PR firm singing our praises, I’ll do a little DIY flackery and round up some of the blog coverage we’ve seen.
Many of the blogs emphasized that pods great places for friends and communities to watch together.
Natali at TechCrunch kicked things off with her post:
HuggyBear wrote a post I want to share, because he said something we’ve heard from others — that a pod is like a blog. I’ll let HuggyBear tell you:
od a go today. It’s a nice way to share you videos, as well as videos from all the major video sharing sites.
The interface work really well. It actually feels similar to Vox in the way the social aspect of the site works.
When you sign up, you create a ‘pod’ which is like a channel in which you store the videos you want to share. Think of it like a blog, but with videos. You have the choice of either uploading you own videos, or going to the major video sharing sites and clicking the ‘bookmarlet‘ which lets you adds a description and tags to each video.
I created a pod and was adding videos withing five minutes. Have a look over at Vod Noodles to see what videos I’m linking to. It even works with Apples movie trailer site.
Russell Heimlich at DV Remote thought VodPod was like Flickr photo pools, but for video:
Steven Bryant , a blogger and freelancer in NYC, picked up on another aspect of VodPod, the built-in search that allows you to feed your Pod:
Finally, Rangwam wrote :
We have YouTube, MySpace, GooGle Video and MetaCafe. Why we need VoDPoD? Well, I think it is the same reason that we have Blogger, WordPress, Windows Live Spaces, etc. We need a service that suits our preference.
VoDPoD wants to be a place that anybody can enjoy. The term “Pods†are video collections organized around a topic or theme. It’s great way for filmmakers to make their videos available to fans, like-minded enthusiasts, friends, or family. It’s your own personal network.
We’ve also seen notices in Italian, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean blogs.
We’ve seen a few places where people shrugged and said, “another video sharing service…” We expected that, and it’s an understandable given how crowded the video space is, and how cynical many people are about online startups in general right now. So we’ve tried to make the case (gently, we hope!) that VodPod isn’t one of those animals; that, indeed, it’s a service that lets you aggregate videos from those sharing sites so you can watch them and talk about them with your friends, all in one place.
All-in-all, feels like a good start. VodPod is a deeper, richer service than it appears at first, and it’s hard to get everything out there on the first pass. So we still have a lot to say: about the ease of adding video to a pod with the bookmarklet; the cool-ness (and ease) of being able to put videos from dozens of websites on to your blog, through the widgets and the organization capabilities of the Pod; and how VodPod will help people sift through the volume and from so many video sites out there, to make sense of it for themselves, their friends, or other people. And that’s not even mentioning the new features coming down the road:-)
Thanks to all of you who have tried out the site, and built a pod. We appreciate your support in the early days!
Filed under: News
December 4, 2006 • 5:26 pm 2
What’s VodPod? We think it’s the best way to collect videos to share with your friends, or a community that shares your interests and tastes.
There are a couple of easy ways to start collecting videos. We have a browser bookmarklet that makes it extremely easy to add video to your pod from hundreds of video sharing sites such as YouTube. With just a click it’s in your Pod. And we have some great widgets that let you bring your Pod to your blog or website.
Or you can use our meta-search service to look for videos on YouTube, Google, Comedy Central, Daily Motion and Myspace.
Pods are made for people, not just videos. You can make your Pod as collaborative and social as you want. Let friends and others add video — if you want. Tell your friends and podmates what to watch — ratings, comments, and a fun drop-down “emoticon” that lets you tell people you loved a video, laughed out loud, or just that you watched it. If you want only a few select people to see your Pod, make it private. Only the people you invite in, get in.
We know that launching VodPod today is just a start. We have lots of ideas about how we’d like to make it better. But we’re just three of what we hope will be many people using VodPod — we’d love to hear from all of you. How can we make it better? What’s your dream feature we haven’t built yet? If you encounter bugs or errors, let us know. We’ve tried to make VodPod as good as possible for launch, but like all software, it’s never quite perfect.
Thanks for trying out the service.
Filed under: Welcome
• 12:41 am 2
Got a blog? If you do, we’ve got widgets for you. Cool widgets that will make your blog an even more fun place to hang out.
Scroll down the page of this blog, look to the right, and you’ll see what we’re talking about. Those are blog widgets for our VodPod Pod, showing some of the videos we’ve put on the service most recently, and what videos people are watching and talking about.
Our widgets work for self-hosted WordPress blogs, Movable Type/Typepad, and Blogger. They should also work just fine on any website, you’ll just need to know how to fiddle with the html/css. Get yer widgets on the “Get Widgets ” link at the top of this page!
Filed under: Publishing Tools , How VodPod Works
• 12:21 am 9
Wikipedia says it’s:
What you need to know is that it’s a nifty little tool that puts the serendipity in VodPod.
Put the bookmarklet on your browser, and you can add videos from YouTube and lots of other similar sites in a click. So when you’re on one of these sites, and you see a video you want your friends to see, you just click on “Add to VodPod” — the window shown below will pop-up so you can add a description, change the title if you want, and tell people what you think (“I Watched it” or “I LOL’d” or “I loved it”), you click “add” and voila, it’s in your pod. And if you’ve put a widget for your Pod on your bog, it’ll show up there, too.
Click on the “Get Widgets” link at the top of the page to get your small javascript program stored as a URL within a bookmark. Or by its cuter name, the bookmarklet. And then pod some videos.
Filed under: Collecting Tools, Tips, Tricks, Hacks , How VodPod Works
December 3, 2006 • 11:40 pm 0
The most important, even revolutionary, developments in the world of online video the last eighteen months have been (a) the maturation of the Flash video player and (b) the rise of the “embed code’ among almost all video sharing and publishing sites.
What is this geeky sounding thing — “embed code” — that we’re referring to? It allows you take a video from YouTube and now hundreds of other video sites, and put it on your webpage, blog, myspace page, or your Pod. You just copy a simple bit of text — called the embed code on most sites — and then paste into the place you want the video to play. It doesn’t actually “copy” the video to your site or blog or Pod; it puts a Flash player on your page, which points to the video file and plays the it back from the hosting site.
It’s simple, but it has and will forever change how video is distributed on the Internet. It has made video far more “liquid” –Â a file can be put up on one site, but then show up on thousands or even millions of websites and blogs and Myspace pages with just a few clicks by each user. As the video sharing sites and media companies start to figure out how to include advertising into these clips, we think more and more video sites will provide embed codes for their videos. They’ll have an economic reason to do so.
VodPod helps you take advantage of these embed codes in two ways:
First, you can build a pod with video from all these video sharing sites, putting all the stuff you love or want your friends to see in one place. With our browser bookmarklet, we help you get the embed code and add it (and the video) to your Pod with just a click.
Second, you can also build your Pod with video you upload to us, to be hosted by us. For videos you upload to us, we’ll provide an embed code so people can put your videos on their websites, blogs and Myspace pages. That means more exposure for your work, and down the road, a way to earn some money if you want.
Filed under: Collecting Tools, Tips, Tricks, Hacks , How VodPod Works
