Vodpod Blog

Ever wanted to have the videos you want, from hundreds of sites around the Web, delivered to you?

Now you can.

We’ve just launched a new addition to vod:pod that makes that possible, here are the details:

* When you join vod:pod, you can now get feeds of videos — basically, a regularly updated selection of videos — delivered to your home page on vod:pod.
* Just click on any thumbnail for a video in your feed, and the video plays right there, right on the page.
* Save the videos you like to one of your Pods, or send them to your friends; we’ve provided handy buttons to do both things.

* You choose what feeds you want to receive. We’ve provided a handy set of pre-selected feeds; or you can add your own custom feeds.
* Pods are feeds (so you’ve got thousands of potential feeds to choose from right from the start). Find a pod you like, add it as one of your feeds!
* You can add feeds from YouTube and Daily Motion by tag or by username, and feeds from Google Video by keyword search.
* And you can add a feed from almost any site that offers video sharing (videos that provide an embed code) and RSS.

If you’ve already started collecting videos in a pod, it’s a great new way to find videos you might like to add to your pod, to show your friends, or to put on your blog with our widgets.

If you’re just interested in the best way to find videos from around the ‘Net, we think you just might like this.

If you want to find out more information about our new feed service, here are some handy links:

Forum
Feed Details & Discussion
Using
Our Recommended Feed
The Video
Inbox
Custom
Feeds, the New Frontier
vod:pod tour

With gazillions of videos now out there on the ‘Net (we don’t know the real number, so gazillions sounds appropriately big), helping people to collect videos (by putting them in their Pods) is a useful thing indeed. Their actions separate the wheat from the chaff, skim the cream from the… Well, you get the idea: people who make great pods make it easier for the rest of us to find the good stuff.

But with over 5000 members and pods, and nearly 30,000 videos collected, we can’t even keep up with it all.

So we built a recommendation engine, and a “Recommended” feed to go with it. Our new Recommended feed will shows you some of the more popular videos when you first start. Then, as you use the “LOL’d” or “Loved” gestures, we’ll get a bit more precise with our recommendations, based on what you like.

Try it out, let us know what you think.

Among the most exciting things we’ve added today is the ability to create a custom feed.

It essentially let’s you add a video feed for any site that supports:

a. RSS

and

b. Video sharing, by providing Flash videos with embed codes.

There are lots of interesting ways in which you can use this. Here is one: you can create a custom feed for blogs that frequently include embedded videos from YouTube, Google, Myspace, Daily Motion or many other sites.

I am a dedicated reader of venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s blog (http://avc.blogs.com), in particular because I like his taste in music. He often adds great new music videos to his blog, so I’ve added a feed for avc.blogs.com as one of my custom feeds on vod:pod. Next time he adds a video that I like, I can easily add it to my music pod!

But while the ability to add a custom feed is exciting, it’s also still a little tricky to use, and we know this the user experience isn’t perfect — yet. Nevertheless, we thought it was important to give our members on vod:pod the chance to start playing with this. We’ll learn a lot, and will be in a position to improve this more rapidly with your help.

You can get further information on custom feeds in the forum. We encourage you to share your discoveries there with other vod:pod members, what’s is working and what isn’t.

There is a lot to this new video feed reader we’ve released today.

Among the features I like the most is the “video inbox.” It’s simple, but addictive.

When you see a video you like, click the “Send to Friend” button. It’s such a nice thing to do.

Send it to a friend on vod:pod, and they’ll get the video in their inbox. A nice place of their own, rather than sending them off to the deepest and furthest corners of the ‘Net.

They can leave you a message on on vod:pod tell you what they think, or let the whole world know they loved the clip, or that it made them laugh out loud. And they can add it to their collection, of course.

You can also send the video to someone who is a friend, but not yet on vod:pod, and they’ll still get it in their inbox. Yep, we’ll set them up with a temporary inbox, where they can watch the video. It’ll take just a few extra clicks for them to join vod:pod and save the video to their pod — if they want.