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The New Vodpod Facebook App

We’ve finally gotten around to re-building our Facebook app. Our new Facebook app is simple, elegant, and exactly the thing you’d want if you like to share videos on Facebook with your friends.

If you use Facebook, get it now! Details on how to install the new app are below, along with an overview of what has changed.

We first built a Facebook app two years ago, when the initial Facebook application platform was launched. We attempted to build as much of the core Vodpod functionality as possible into that first app. That approach proved hard to maintain and was overly complicated; as a result the Vodpod Facebook app was the poor step-sister in our family of publishing tools.

The new Vodpod Facebook does one thing, and it does it well — it puts a nice looking entry in your Facebook feed (video thumbnail, title and your comment) whenever you add a video to your Vodpod collection:

facebook_feed_item

If this is so simple, why is it so great? Because your friends will actually see when you’ve added a video, and they’ll be more likely to watch what you’re collecting. And, because Vodpod allows you to share your favorite videos with a click from more than 10,000 different sites, they’ll be able to see all your favorites (and not just the videos you like on YouTube or DailyMotion). Over the past week, I’ve noticed that my Facebook friends are watching — and commenting on — videos I add far more frequently than they did with our old application.

It’s just three quick steps to install. Go to your Vodpod home page, and under the “share and publish” menu on the right, click Facebook and then click the “Connect with Facebook” button at the top of the page.

You’ll see three quick screens asking you to give our new app various permissions in order to publish items to your Facebook feed.

The first screen asks you to allow access for the Vodpod Facebook app — just click the big blue “Allow Access” button:

fbook_allow_access

The second screen asks for permission for “Offline Access” — which means we can publish to your Facebook page even when you’re not logged in and using Facebook. Click “allow offline access.”

fbook_allow_offline_access

The final step asks is a simple permission to allow us to publish content to your feed — click “Allow Publishing”:

fbook_allow_publishing

We’ll take you to your Vodpod account page to confirm the application is installed — you should see a screen that looks like this:

facebook_integration_vodpod

That’s it, with those quick steps the Vodpod Facebook app is installed. Next time you add a video to your Vodpod collection, you’re Facebook friends will see it in their feed.

Filed under: FAQs, News, Publishing Tools

10,000 Sites and Counting

It’s been about six month since we last gave an update on the Vodpod Sitegeist — that is, the number and type of video sites from which our members collect video.

In that last post, at the end of December 2008, we noted that Vodpod Sitegeist was up to 6,239 sites. As of this morning, Vodpod members have collected videos from 10,020 different video sites. My calculator reports that that is 60% growth in just a little over six months.

We will update our embedcode.org Top 100 list later today. But what stands out to me is the predominance and continued proliferation of vertical, niche videos sites such as WorldStarHipHop, Kidstube, Sciencestage, Carhub.tv and Ted.com.

These are all examples from just the top 100 sites on the list — and give an insight into the sheer range and diversity of what we’re seeing overall.

Filed under: Basics, News

Using the Vodpod Organizer to Publish a Set of Videos

Our Organizer is a really powerful tool if you want to quickly curate a set of videos to publish to a widget, VodSpot, or a video site powered by our API.

From your Vodpod home page, click the “organize your videos” link. This will bring up the organizer:

organizer

You can then use the organizer to quickly assemble a set of videos from your collection. Just shift + click to select the videos you want (or use search to refine your list first). Once you have selected the videos you want, you can then give them a specific tag (or tags), or move them into a separate collection.

Then, just setup a widget based on those tags (or, create a VodSpot module that points to those tags).

Filed under: Basics, FAQs, For Your Blog, Publishing Tools, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

Upgrade went a little rough…

We’ve updated the site today to Rails 2.3, which is a great change, but has definitely caused some problems and headaches. We’re working hard to fix things.

One big problem is that our forums are totally hosed. So please use this blog (and comments on this post) if you need to communicate with us for now.

–scott

Filed under: News

Techstars.tv on Boxee, with Vodpod

We love it when people build cool stuff using Vodpod.

When we launched VodSpot last year, among the first folks to try it out was TechStars. They built a really nice video site using VodSpot, which was impressive given our early tools were a bit crude!

TechStars is a Boulder-based seed investment fund, that provides a lot more than early stage funding to entrepreneurs. They invite a select group of start-ups to Boulder each summer, provide them with early funding and great mentors. Check out their VodSpot at TechStars.tv or their website to learn more.

Now TechStars has gone further, and built a Boxee application. David Cohen, the man behind TechStars, describes it on their blog — here are a few key bits:

I thought I’d take a second and tell you how we built TechStars.tv, because I think the solutions we’re using rock.

The TechStars.tv web site is powered by VodSpot, which is one of the services available from Vodpod, a popular video bookmarking service. VodSpot gives you a flexible, branded, fully-skinned way to display any given collection of videos from around the web. It supports all the popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Your VodSpot doesn’t host your videos, it just organizes videos that already exist elsewhere on the web. It’s simple, intuitive, and it works flawlessly. When you are looking at TechStars.tv, you’re looking at an example of VodSpot, plain and simple. We’ve just skinned it to look like the TechStars web site using CSS. Our collection of videos simply includes our original content such as our new weekly documentary series “The Founders” as well as other relevant content from our great mentors from around the web.

Once we had this working, it seemed like the natural thing to do was to enable the content within Boxee. I dropped a note to the guys at VodPod, and they quickly turned around and gave me a video RSS feed that was compatible with Boxee. I then tweeted to see if anybody in our community might want to hack together a Boxee app out of that feed. Michael Sitarzewski stepped up and spent one late night figuring it out. It’s pretty simple (basic instructions here) and Michael had the finished up completed in two or three days. Of course, he rocks, so it might take normal people longer. Michael runs a startup called Callisto.fm which is a new way to discover and listen to podcasts. If you dig the Boxee app he helped create, please give him some feedback on Callisto.fm – I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

So there you have it – TechStars.tv is now live on Boxee. Thanks to VodPod and Michael of Callisto.fm for their help in making it happen.

That’s cool! We’ve got Boxee running on a Mac Mini and 42″ flat panel here at Vodpod HQ — we’re looking forward to playing with the new TechStars app this afternoon.

As we blogged a few weeks ago, anyone can get their Vodpod collection working on Boxee. It’s cool to see people starting to build apps now — this is definitely something we’re paying close attention to, and we expect to have more on this later in the summer.

Filed under: Stuff We Love, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

Major “surgery” in vodpod engineering

Summer seems like a great time to revamp our hosting stack and upgrade our application to Rails 2.3!

We’re finally ditching Apache in favor of Nginx + HAProxy. It’s a little scary to leave the warm embrace of good ‘ol Apache – but we’re ready to move on. Seems sort of appropriate, as we move from something US-built to find products from Russia and France, it rather reflects the growth of vodpod overall.

This change should mean better site performance and more capacity for growth.

Filed under: News

VodTweet

  • Vodpod DB maintenance done, you should be able to add videos without a hitch. Thanks for your patience.....just about...1 day ago
  • We're doing maintenance on our databases this morning, so Vodpod is "read-only" for the next couple of hours. Thanks for the patience.....just about...1 day ago
  • A little Vodpod maintenance tomorrow AM to fix our Mysql bug. 8am-11am PT. http://bit.ly/8vBgA6....just about...2 days ago
  • Apologies for our 20 min outage today. Our database software (Mysql) has a bug that brought down our database.....just about...2 days ago
  • Vodpod currently "read only" due to a database glitch, we're working to bring it back up. Hope to have everything working again in a moment.....just about...2 days ago