Vodpod Blog

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:

I’ve been giving Vod 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:

Brayn wrote:

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!