Last night the next-iteration of the Viddler.com web site and video player launched. The development team did a nearly 18-hour development cycle in some borrowed office space we managed to secure in Santa Clara.
The latest version of Viddler really add some fantastic features, which will be detailed much better on the Viddler blog once some of the major kinks have been worked out – but here is a general overview:
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Video commenting can now be done on the timeline. This makes it quick and easy to actually respond to a video using your web cam while you’re watching the video. Here is a comment I left on one of Chris Tingom’s videos.
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Global commenting shows all of the comments in the timeline, as well as just general comments that were left about the video, in a threaded manner below the video.
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Feeds are found everywhere to make it easy to subscribe to the forums, your favorite users, your own videos for syndicating to your blog perhaps (like Chris J. Davis’ lifestream as an example) and even tag subscriptions.
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Sharing your videos has never been easier and the functionality has been enhanced ten-fold with this version. You can now do things like give out a "Secret URL" to share private videos with non-Viddler users. Or, you can share your videos with your friends via any of the many social sites out there.
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Blogging your videos can now be done without ever leaving Viddler. Two-clicks and a video is posted to your blog via XML-RPC. I love this feature, and we’re working hard to expand on it to include even more blogging platforms.
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Personal and global tags now make it easier to look at a specific user’s videos filtered by a specific tag. Or, you can view all videos tagged with a keyword.
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Social tagging means that you can now tag your friends videos, in case their lazy. Or, you might want to tag a video to make it easier to find later. Right now, this is limited to timed tags only – but it won’t be long until you can also use this for global tags on a video.
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Flickr and Twitter have been integrated into user profiles. To go beyond that, Viddler will now automatically update your Twitter account whenever you "do something" on Viddler. This is highly-customizable, so go into your profile options and check it out.
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Yes there is more. Our featured videos have an updated home. Now it is easier than ever to keep up-to-date with the greatest videos on Viddler. Not only are the latest few shown on the user’s dashboard, but we’ve created a calendar to show each day’s featured video.
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Several new ways to explore videos are now in the Explore section. You can view by Most Popular, Most Favorited, Most Discussed, and so on. This will make it easier to find content that the entire community is watching, favoriting, or talking about.
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Play all of a single user’s videos with one click. Simply go to a video of the user you want to watch, click Play All, and Viddler will create a "playlist" of all of that user’s videos and automatically play them all. You can skip around if you’d like to.
There are endless updates to Viddler’s UI, as well as over 100 revisions that have been made within the video player itself, and that is only scratching the surface of what Viddler 2.0 really holds. I’m really happy with the way that this version has turned out, and I’m looking forward to seeing what is next, and how the community utilizes these great new features.
I’m writing this email in the back of the "Viddler mobile" in Santa Clara, California on the way to San Francisco to the Moscone Center for the Web 2.0 Expo. If you have any questions about Viddler 2.0, send me an email or message and I’ll get back to you asap.
[tags]viddler, version 2, upgrade, flickr, twitter, features[/tags]
[slug]viddler2-launch[/slug]
