Something must have told the Twitvid team that this is a logical direction to take Twitvid but I don’t see it. Broad category social networks have, more or less, been done and will, more than likely, stay the same as they are now for a long time. The best way to compete in social networking is by creating niche communities. Broad category video sharing is simply not niche enough to cut out a following.

Twitvid was and should have been a utility for sharing videos via Twitter since Twitter doesn’t currently allow that. I’m sure Twitter Photos, which all but negated the need for Twitpic and others, scared Twitvid into this pivot. But what would have been even more sensible is to, like Photobucket, make a deal with Twitter to handle their official service in an unobtrusively and mutually beneficial way.

Millions have used Twitvid and I’m sure many will continue to. However, I’ll go on record as saying that not many of those people will use these new features on Twitvid. I think this move sounds the death knell for Twitvid.

A good read and a discussion I’ll be sure to follow.

Google+ has run me over like a freight train. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living on it instead of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. In fact, I made the prediction that Google+ could replace many of the most popular services.

But before I get into all of that I thought I’d share how Google+ is different.

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn was created to be the professional’s social network. A network of people that are connected at some professional, rather than personal or familial, level. This sort of distinction for LinkedIn is completely different to that of Facebook, which tries to connect people that know each other in some way, or Twitter, which doesn’t care if you know anyone, and is an invaluable differentiator in the world of social networking. Heck, it led to LNKD.

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

Circles are nondescript buckets of relationships that you create on your own and can change at anytime. For example you can create some typical social Circles for Coworkers, Friends, Family, Ex-Schoolmates, Basketball Friends, etc. Each of these Circles will have specific meaning to you and no one else. They allow you to segregate your relationships into very meaningful categories that help you connect with many different people all in one place.

Why is this a good thing? In my mind the reasons are innumerable. For instance, maintaining profiles and networks in multiple locations, and somehow engaging with those services regularly, can end up being a monumental draw on your time. I won’t say it is a waste of your time because keeping a LinkedIn profile up-to-date and active has meant many professional opportunities for people. However, keeping every single site up-to-date can get cumbersome and, for those that “follow” you in multiple locations, noisy.

Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook networks could all co-exist and never intersect using Google+’s Circles.

One more thing to say about Circles… they aren’t just lists. Facebook and Twitter both have lists and Google+’s Circles are not, and should not be, comparable. On Facebook someone has to confirm that you are their friend before the relationship is created. So if you only want to “follow” what is going on with a particular person you can’t unless they approve the relationship (or if they are a Celebrity and create a “page” for themselves rather than a normal account). Once they have, though, you can then separate them into lists. On Facebook you may use lists to filter your main stream or use them to send messages directly to those within those lists (though not nearly as easily as you can on Google+ which I’ll get to in the next paragraph). On Twitter, lists are made to keep your main stream cleaner. Rather than “following” Ashton Kutcher, as an example, one can add him to a Celebrities or Entrepreneurs or Investors list. This way Kutcher’s tweets don’t muddy up your main stream but you can check in with him from time-to-time using Twitter’s Lists. At least, that is how I use Lists. Oh, and you can’t specify how you share on Twitter. You’re either public or private and that is it.

Here is where Google+’s Circles really separate themselves from the pack. Sharing. Anything you share on Google+; a post, a photo, a video, specific information on your profile such as your phone number, etc. can be shared with a limitless subset of your relationships on Google+.

Here, I’ll provide some examples. Let’s say that you want to send a message to everyone at work. If you had a Coworkers Circle you can type in your message to them, choose to only share it with your Coworkers, and hit publish. Only people that you’ve put into the Coworkers Circle will see it. But it can get even more granular than that. You can choose to share a bit of information with more than one Circle or a Circle and a specific person and so on. Maybe you want to tell all of your friends that you’re going to see a movie tonight but you also want to tell your family and one guy from work. You can do that. Or maybe you just want to send a message to one particular person, or two or three, you can do that too. Or, better yet, maybe you want to send a message to someone privately that doesn’t even have you in their Circles, you can do that (unlike Twitter’s Direct Message feature).

Privacy and Sharing options on Google+ are probably the best we’ve ever seen on a social networking service to-date and, believe it or not, they’ve made it pretty easy to understand and use. We all remember the flack Facebook got for making privacy confusing to its hundreds of millions of users. Google+’s privacy options, by comparison, are very easy to understand.

They even have a “view my profile as” feature that allows you to view your own profile as if you were someone else. You can view your profile as if you were your boss or the public-at-large or your future girlfriend. This makes it simple to edit who can see what.

Hopefully this helps frame where Google+ could potentially fit for some. It could, in theory, replace Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s niche approach to social networking and allow you to combine all of your relationships in one place. And, you can control exactly what you call those relationships rather than being tied down to the world’s nomenclature of relationships.

The Plusses

I’ve described why Circles are, potentially, better at describing relationships and give us the ability to combine all of our social networks in one spot. But that isn’t the only thing Google+ has going for it.

Ever since the days of Brightkite I’ve been using a secondary service to handle check-ins. Checking into a place, for me, is a better option than simply tweeting “I’m at such-and-such with so-and-so”. Surrounding a check-in is important metadata like location, time, etc. and a tweet is fleeting. Also many check-in services provide you with some sort of context around the location you’re currently in. At the moment my favorite check-in service is Foursquare. However, Google+ provides you with a nice set of check-in tools (although very young). From the Google+ iPhone application you can simply check-into a place and provide no other information (ala Foursquare, Gowalla) or you can choose to add additional information or a photo. While it separates out an actual check-in from a normal post it doesn’t make you feel as though the two are not interchangeable. They’ve struck a great balance with this and I can only hope it will get better.

Photo sharing from your computer or mobile-phone on Google+ is not only simple but also has a rich feature-set. Don’t forget, you can use the power of your Circles to share photos with any subset of your relationships. A photo of your newborn that you only want mom and dad to see? Done. A super-secret-mockup of something you’re building at work that you only want your coworkers and wife to see? Done. A photo of you in front of a landmark for the whole world to see? Done. Oh, and Google+ allows you to apply some effects to your photos as well. Someday Google+ could replace Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook photos.

Posts on Google+ have no character limit. Some consider the 140-character limit of Twitter to be its single greatest strength. As is often said sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. There are times when our thoughts span beyond 140-characters (no matter how succinct you are). I’ve found the slightly longer posts of Google+ to be most enjoyable and the Google+ team have designed the interface in such a way that longer posts don’t detract from the shorter ones. The vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Google+ could fit within Twitter’s character limit but every once in a while people have more to say.

Google+’s Hangout, Huddle, and Sparks features are neat but they don’t yet fit into my plusses list. They aren’t minuses either. Whether you use them or not they do not get in the way. I’ve played around with these features and while I haven’t found a valuable use for them yet I may in the future.

The Minuses

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

Keeping up with your stream on Google+ is fairly impossible and by that I mean making sure you see every single message. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that these realtime services care less and less about people keeping up-to-date with what has happened but care much more about showing them what is happening right now. This is a design choice and one that ultimately we may all have to get used to – but it isn’t one I particularly care for at the moment. Right or wrong I treat these streams like I treat my email inbox. I don’t want to miss messages from my family or friends and on Google+ this is very difficult. You see, Google+’s stream shows you the most-recently-updated post on top rather than the most-recently-published post. This distinction is important. A post that was written 5 days ago could resurface to the very top of your stream because someone left a comment in it. From what I’ve heard and read Google is using some complex computation to manage the stream. These guys are extremely good at fiddling with “algorithms” until they’re just right so I’ll withhold judgement on how they do this until they think they’ve got it.

The brevity of tweets makes them very, very easy to consume. Posts on Google+ can be a little harder to digest and that has caused, in some, a feeling of being overwhelmed. When my mother logs onto Twitter she sees a few messages from friends and family and perhaps a tweet or two from NASA. On Google+ with links, photos, videos, hangouts, etc. it can be a bit jarring and you feel like you can’t get your feet on the ground. Maybe Google will be able to figure out this problem but maybe not. Those of us that stick with Google+ may be the type of people that can wade through an enormous amount of information quickly while those that can will be left out in the cold. We’ll see.

At a technical level Google+ is fairly sound. The growth rate of Google+ has been nothing short of astounding and the fact that there hasn’t been an interruption in service is commendable. The iPhone application, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It was released fairly soon after Google+ went into “field testing” mode and its newness shows. It is incredibly slow, poorly designed (for actual use but it looks great), and has major issues with location. These types of frustrations, no doubt, will go away but for now the iPhone application falls squarely at the bottom of my minuses list.

Overall I believe that Google+ could replace many services for me; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr. Each of these services may still have their place but the majority of what I choose to share could definitely be handled by Google+ if more people actively used it. Ultimately whether or not I go 100% Google+ or not will depend on whether or not people adopt it. I don’t know if the 25M+ people that have created Google+ accounts will give it enough time to sink in and use it on a daily basis. Selfishly I hope they do because I’m sort of tired with keeping up with multiple streams and services. It’d be very nice to consolidate many of these things into one stream.

Time will tell where we all end up. But if you’d like to add me to your “Really Cool People” Circle I’ve created a special URL for my Google+ profile: cdevroe.com/+

And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.

Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.

Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.

Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.

Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.

Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.

Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.

Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.

I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.

So far I’ve used it to share files to and from my iPhone, large files with people over email, publish a private photo collection and much more. I can see my use of Dropbox expanding to many more uses but for now I did all of the above without paying a dime. And to top it off Dropbox implemented one of my recommendations within one build.

They have a referral program to ‘earn’ more space. If you want to help give me space you can use this link. If you’d rather not, you can use this link instead. No matter what – this is me recommending that you give Dropbox a try.

I’m going to be making small adjustments, enhancements, and do some all-out-late-night hacking in order to get this site up to snuff to handle notes, links, mobile photos, mobile notes (or, anything too long to fit on Twitter), and videos. I’ve already put the most recent mobile photos in the sidebar and spruced up the way WordPress shows the mobile photos category. I’ve got a lot more planned although I doubt the overall design of this site will change much.

I plan on sharing some of the code I write here on the blog too. So expect the geek knob on this thing to get turned up a bit. (You’re probably thinking, wasn’t the geek knob already at 11?).

I also plan on sharing a lot more Viddler-development related information through this site. As I look around at how other Evangelists are spreading information about their respective products – I see that I’m lagging behind. I don’t want to give any excuses, but, Viddler has been pretty focused on growing our Business services lately. And we’ll continue to be. But I’m going to take some time to spruce up our developers offerings as well as see if I can create some energy behind development on top of our platform. If you’re developer, stay tuned.

Onward! Upward!

Finally! I’ve been looking for an iPhone application that allowed me to quickly share my contact information with other iPhone (or iPod touch) owners. What’s more, is that if I have someone else’s contact information I can share that with others too.

Over the past year and a half I can not tell you how many times I’ve found myself in a situation where this application would have come in handy.

The fact that it is a free application is nearly absurd. There is a premium version, which is currently $2.99, so after giving this application a spin once or twice I’m going to buy the premium version — not to get rid of the ads but to support the application’s developers.

Source: Handshake. (direct link to iTunes)
Via: John Gruber.

On Friday, while I was at Viddler HQ fooling around with Rob, I noticed my friend Dan Rubin twittered the following:

“if I ditch cable, buy an AppleTV and only watch shows I’ve BT’d (I’ll pay for movie rentals), I’ll save myself over $600/year (ATV included)”

Allow me, first, to decrypt this message for you.  What Dan is saying here is that if he ditched cable television, bought an Apple TV, only watched shows that he download via BitTorrent and movie rentals through the Apple TV, he’d save $600 per year even with the price of the Apple TV taken into consideration.

The part of this post that interested me most was him saying that he’d watch shows that he downloaded via BitTorrent on his TV with the Apple TV.  So on my way home from ViddlerHQ, a one and half hour drive from the office to my doorstep, I called Dan and asked if he found an easy way to accomplish this.

From my, albeit very minimal amount of, research I’ve found that getting the Apple TV to play most codecs is no “easy” task.  Sure if you like the command line and SSHing into the Apple TV to hack the crap out of it, then it might be right up your alley, but I am always up for the quickest, simplest solution.

That is when Dan told me how he currently solves this problem; Connect 360.

I had seen Connect 360 around the Interwebs before, but I had never given it a spin.  This weekend I downloaded the trial, tried it out, and within 10 minutes of using it on my Xbox 360, I bought it.

Connect 360, in as simplest terms as possible, tricks your Xbox 360 into thinking your Macintosh is a Windows PC – and by extension shares your iTunes, iPhoto, and Video libraries to be enjoyed on your TV.  It works like a charm too.

My Connect 360 Preference pane.

This simple preference pane is where you adjust your options for Connect 360.  From then on it runs as a background process and “just works”.

If you have an Xbox 360 and, like me, have been wanting to jump onto the Apple TV in order to share music, photos, and video to your TV – consider purchasing a copy of Connect 360.  I’m really happy I did.

Thanks again Dan.

I’d be remiss not to mention my goal of Bringing it all together and how I’m getting pretty close to my personal online publishing Utopia.

Jeremy Keith wrote about his personal efforts, and the efforts of a few others, and how the strategies all differ. It seems that there are few different ways to go about “bringing it all together”, you just have to choose which one you like the best.  Here is a short list:

• Publish only on your own site.
• Publish everywhere but aggregate back to your site.
• Publish everywhere but link from your site.

Source: Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

Ok, on with my point before this too gets unwieldy.

The Panelists

In the “Better than 1,000 Words: Video on the Web” panel one of the panelists said: “The problem is finding the good stuff, not that it doesn’t exist” which came from the panel’s thoughts on YouTube. And I completely agree with them. The amount of content on YouTube, and many other large video community sites, is staggering and it is being created and distributed so fast it feels like a runaway train. This has always been the challenge of the web – finding the signal inside of the noise. I believe that smaller communities will emerge, dedicated and focused on a singular idea or genre of video, and it won’t matter what video service you use because all of the content will be automatically aggregated and segregated. Unless of course your content is best suited for these services flagship technologies. We’re already seeing sites and services that do this, and even build ranking systems on top of them – but I believe we’ll start to see much more refinement in this process to where the communities are very, very focused.

For instance, many video sharing services build groups or channels to pool videos together in an attempt to create and foster those communities around a specific topic or genre. And this is fine and dandy, but we’re going to see a lot of these groups and channels branch out into entire sites decided to that topic or genre. Some of them are popping up already, but I really do believe that we’re going to start seeing communities that form around very specific criteria – perhaps even within age groups, sexes, or geographic location. Again, the problem isn’t that the quality doesn’t exist out there – it is just hard to find it unless someone does some work to help separate it out.

So how will this happen? Obviously there has been a lot of development in making it very easy to upload and share video online, and the infrastructures that are behind these services are years ahead of anyone starting on day one. So how do these communities develop? They’ll leverage (Web 2.0 expression borrowed from Andy, thanks Andy) the existing services, their APIs, their features, and their infrastructure and build community specific features ontop of them to allow their respective communities to flourish without constraint.

So I agree that it is difficult to find really good content on some of these larger communities, but I think we’ll stop looking at these larger communities for the content soon – and we’ll look more to the focused communities that still use the same technologies as these services with a little bit of salt, pepper, and (insert your favorite spice name here) to allow the content to shine above all else.

Oh, and even if I wasn’t consulting for Viddler I would say that I believe Viddler will be one of the leaders in this new wave of how video is being shared online. Again, in the near future.

UPDATE: Loren is right, Jeff Jarvis is not the future of online video.

[tags]video, online, sharing, viddler, youtube, sxsw, panel, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]near-future-video[/slug]

I wanted to give an overview of some of the things we were able to do this week as well as give a general synopsis of some of the things to come. Perhaps some of you can even help out a little.

It took me a little while to get familiar with their systems, but overall I like how they have things setup. Viddler uses many internal systems to not only monitor their service, but also to collaborate on various tasks and bug fixes. Viddler uses SVN, Trac, email, calendars, Skype, and a host of over little bits in order to keep up-to-date with each other and get things accomplished. Not surprisingly they also use Viddler to post videos of some of the new things they are doing, which they keep private, and then share those videos among the team.

Having some of the team here in Pennsylvania (Viddler HQ with a few people is in Bethlehem and I’m about an hour and half from there), some of the team is in Phoenix, Arizona, some in Poland, etc. I think the team does a really great job of keeping up with each other and they seem to get a lot of work accomplished.

After I got up-to-speed with all of their systems and got a feel for how Viddler wanted to start to bolster a really active community I wrote about how Viddler is going to smash down the wall between the team and Viddler’s users. And that is incredibly true. Viddler wants its users to become active, outspoken, and they will listen.

For the rest of the week we had some meetings with a few potential sponsors and partners to get some contests together which is starting to become really exciting. What better way is there to get a community excited than to start handing them cool stuff for using the service?! I can’t wait to get some of these contests going since I know they will be a huge hit, and I will have fun going through all of the submissions.

In between meetings and strategizing we were able to choose the week’s featured video which came from a couple of easy riders which I thought was some great video from the front of a motorcycle during a race in London. The diversity of the people, content, and videos that you find on Viddler is really refreshing. Rather than just having commercials, clips from TV, and clips of people doing stupid things (which Viddler has its full share of too), there is also a whole host of independently created content that I really enjoy.

Shortly after getting this video together we started some conversations with my good friend Gary from WineLibrary TV in order to full host a searchable backup of all of his episodes. There is some really exciting stuff that will be coming from this “partnership” not only in the form of content generation, searching, timed tags, etc. – but Wine Library’s community is incredibly active so we look forward to seeing some of their audience spill over into Viddler and becoming active in that community as well.

Friday came around too quickly and so we thought we’d have some Friday fun. Some things people try is amazing.

So after three days we’re making some serious strides. Not only is the entire development team making leaps and bounds in the area of video sharing online (trust me, you have not seen anything yet as I feel that Viddler will be the video sharing site of the future for professionals) but we’ve also started to see an upturn in the number of new users, videos, and overall traffic to the site. In only three days! Here is to hoping the trend continues.

If you are a video content producer, someone that puts on slideshows or demonstrations or screencasts, or just want to use your webcam to record a video to share with your family – please check out Viddler and see why I think it is or will become the best service available.

[tags]viddler, winelibrarytv, video, sharing, community, skype, trac, contests[/tags]
[slug]viddler-week-one[/slug]

In short, if you pull open a remote Library that you’d like to grab a few photos from, and use iPhoto’s built in calendar feature to filter that Library to a specific year/month – you will find it is impossible to drag those photos onto your local Library.

To restore the sharing ability, after having selected 142 photos in my case, I had to disable the calendar feature (by clicking the small X in the calendar) clicking on the main shared Library in the source, reselecting all of the photos I wanted, and dragging them onto my local Library.

Ugh. I might switch to Aperature sooner than later. But not until after I put it through the ringer to be sure that the main problems I’ve had with iPhoto do not exist also in Aperature.

[tags]iphoto, apple, macintosh, software, applications, sharing, bugs[/tags]

[tags]flickr, creative commons, pbs, sharing, community[/tags]

Flickr provides me with a great way to share photos with friends and family, and it has some useful tools for me to tag (categorize) as well as geotag (or note where I took the photo), and it lets me connect with different sets of people by using Flickr’s groups. These are all great. However the data that I put into Flickr is not mine and without using the API I will never be able to benefit too greatly from putting in the time it takes to utilize all of Flickr’s tools.

Del.icio.us is a great way to post your favorite URLs, tag (categorize) them, and make some small notes. Obviously there is the entire community aspect too though I’ve never taken full advantage of any of them. Also I do not use del.icio.us (boy is that annoying to type everytime) as my bookmark storage solution.

So I don’t fully utilize the two major web services that I would otherwise really like to — so perhaps something else could be done to openly share data and yet reap the most benefit from the time I put into cataloging it. I think my personal site is the perfect platform for this, and I’m going to start making both dramatic and subtle changes to the site and its architecture in order to do this.

Please “stand by” while I make some adjustments (which will probably take a total of two or three weeks to make, though you should start seeing some of these changes within the next few days).

[tags]cdevroe.com, updates, flickr, delicious, bookmarks, photos, sharing, web services, api[/tags]