“Sometimes the next thing does less, and is better for it — not in every way, but overall. If we never let go of old technology, we’d be buried in complexity and crushed by outdated crap.”

Keep this quote in mind when the next version of Viddler is released. Sometimes you just have to get rid of things for the sake of making progress. It isn’t easy. But progress rarely is.

Matt tried to make me look good.

Moving out of this building next month.

What Derek brings to HQ.

It was a hard fought battle.

In a rented Best Western conference room. Classy.

I talked the best smack but ultimately lost miserably.

Not everyone but closer than usual.

“The idea that every tech company needs to be in the Bay Area is dead and buried. May it Rest in Peace.”

In a recent video interview at Streaming Media East Viddler’s own President Rob Sandie made this point too. We’ve built Viddler in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (and in Krakow, Poland, Phoenix, Arizona, Iceland, Australia, etc.) and have used the Internet to keep ourselves up-to-date with some of the things going on around the world in tech.

The upgrades to Viddler Business accounts are pouring in. We are monitoring them on the iPad 2.

If you have any reason whatsoever to use video for your business, website, or yourself – consider using Viddler. It will feed my future children if you do.

Barz weighed in on Color’s $41M funding. I haven’t done so because I feel it has been a big distraction and much of the coverage has been by those that clearly have no insight into this industry (I consider myself someone who has very little valuable insight into such things). Barz has that insight. And his take is both sobering and balanced. He mainly comments on Henry Blodget’s take in Business Insider.

“It leads me to believe that Mr. Blodget’s piece might be satirical.”

And then…

“Mr. Blodget points out all the reasons why investing $41 million at this stage is a good idea. For instance, he points out that with that investment, Color is worth at LEAST $41 million to any buyer! Even if they spend half of it, Blodget assumes that the company would then have $20 million in cash and $20 million in a good idea developed! I mean, LOL. The investors can’t lose, he points out, because they have preferred stock. “

If you knew Wayne you’d be LOLing right along with him. I love the ending…

“Funds with a lot of money get to start the bubbles. Like a big ponzi scheme, the first ones in reap the most benefit. Because in a bubble, there’s always someone next in line ready to add more air. Until there isn’t.”

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Robert quipped that he was happy that he stuck to his guns regarding longform videos of this type. He isn’t alone.

Not too long after the Twitter video was recorded, at Web 2 Expo in San Fransisco, I was fortunate enough to record an episode of LunchMeet with Eddie Codel.

Here is that episode (in the Viddler player because PodTech’s embed no longer works):

You may argue that Viddler hasn’t had the cultural impact that Twitter has had on the world – but you’re not sitting in this chair. Viddler has done amazing things since that day with a meager budget, only a small percentage of the man-power, and from locations that many think out-of-touch.

Many of these stories are about to be told on The Viddler Spotlight. Stay tuned.

If you couldn’t attend MagicRuby in Orlando, Florida you can view some short and sweet video interviews with some of the attendees and speakers over on Viddler.

We’ve set up a special page on Viddler just for Magic Ruby to help let people know some of the things we’re already doing with the Ruby community. We hope to learn a little about Ruby, to let attendees know about Viddler, and to enjoy the weather.

Viddler’s offerings to developers aren’t limited to only Ruby. We’ve got a fantastic API that has been recently overhauled and wrappers for just about every language. We power some of the biggest brands online and our platform has been used to power web sites, applications, iPhone and iPad applications and much more. I personally hope to help Viddler grow in this area in 2011.

If you’re a developer and ever have any video needs – consider using Viddler for your next project.

John Gruber, as he typically does, does a good job asking the same questions as I would. So I recommend giving his questions to Google a perusal.

However, I’d like to comment his 3rd question to Google. When WebM was announced in May of last year it was said that YouTube would immediately begin to encode their videos in WebM. And, according to YouTube’s HTML5 page, they did exactly that. So part of John’s question is answered. But the other parts – whether or not YouTube will drop support for H.264 or not, and why – remind unanswered so far.

My biggest “huh?” to all of this is Google’s “to foster competition” and “web innovation” statements as to why they are doing this. Gruber is asking why the Flash Player plugin isn’t being removed from being bundled with Google Chrome. I’m wondering how removing support for H.264 video playback is “fostering competition” at all. Isn’t it squashing it?

Think about where the competition really happens for video codecs. Users of the Internet will never decide on a codec. They don’t care. Developers and engineers do. Apple will decide what they will support with their devices, Google with theirs, RIM with theirs, HP, Dell, Toshiba with theirs. My mother could care less if a video is in Flash, H.264, WebM, Theora or any other video codec – she would simply want to view the video and would probably download any software it would take for her to be able to watch it. Do you think she really knows that when she goes to the YouTube application on her iPod Touch that the video that is being delivered is in H.264?

So really, the “competition” doesn’t happen at the user level. It happens at the engineering level. Engineers will pit two codecs against each other and see how they stack up. They’ll decide which to use based on the quality of the codec and then they’ll measure that against the install base for that codec. Right now H.264 is comparable on nearly every level to WebM while the install base for H.264 is enormous in comparison to WebM. So the decision is still pretty clear which codec most engineers would choose for video playback. Unless they are open source zealots that think Apple’s approach to things like H.264, iOS and the App Stores is “closed”.

Now, if Adobe removed H.264 playback from the Flash Player – that’d make some waves. That’d change the game a bit.

All of this being said I really don’t care. Even as a team member for Viddler, a company that has millions of videos that we take care of, I don’t mind allowing the industry to figure some of these things out. I side with the end users and so does Viddler. Viddler will always strive to deliver high-quality video to users the way that the majority of them want it regardless of their device. As of today an overwhelming number of the Internet-connected computers in the world support H.264 playback via Flash Player. So we deliver that. The next step down is H.264 playback via the <video> tag. We deliver that too. If we see a strong need for serving all of our videos via WebM to our users – we’ll deliver that too. We’re already prepared for it. Each of our team member’s have very strong opinions about what is going down in this space – but at the end of the day we’re willing to deliver video for our customers how and where they want it.

I’m working on a relatively big update to Viddler’s WordPress plugin and something that doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere is how to test a Dashboard Widget if your plugin supports one.

It is fairly easy to add just a bit of code to make it pretty simple to test your widget. First, rather than only loading your WordPress Admin URL (ie. yoursite.com/wp-admin) you simply prepend the appropriate information to the end of the URL. Like this: yousite.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=viddler&noheader.

Then, somewhere within your plugin’s code, you add something like the following:
function viddler_page() {
if ( isset( $_GET['noheader'] ) )
return viddler_dashboard_content();
}

Obviously viddler_dashboard_content() is the function that I use to build the HTML for the Dashboard Widget. This will return the HTML you’re creating for your WordPress Admin Dashboard Widget sans JavaScript and CSS. But at least you’re able to test your output.

/via the Viddler Developers Group.

On Twitter they only have 40,000 followers and as far as I know they have millions of users. So obviously most of their community has no idea what is going on.

As someone who has been in this type of situation with Viddler (though our longest period of downtime has only been a few hours in 5 years) I can sympathize with the amount of effort that is going on behind the scenes by their entire team. However, let this be a lesson for the rest of us in what not to do.

Update: And just like that they’ve sent out a second tweet. With their own Tumblr-powered blog being down I suppose their options were limited in how they can communicate with their community.

Update again: Tumblr has now published a post-mordem report on what happened, how they’re dealing with it, and how they hope it doesn’t happen again. No new information though the words do seem sincere.

I’m sure Tumblr, and everyone that was watching this all happen, learned a lot of lessons during this event.

That is what happened at Viddler when we didn’t realize we had incorrectly setup our robots.txt file, making Viddler bad for SEO, and we were called out on it. Whether or not you know what a robots.txt file is or not doesn’t really matter. The point was we held this particular issue in pretty high regard and yet – somehow – we missed it.

Once we found out that we had missed this we immediately went to work on fixing it. It is OK to miss things now and then – everyone does, everyone will, I will, you will – but it is what you do when you find out that matters.

Viddler is great for SEO. It is great in every way that we can make it great for our customers. And we’re going to strive to keep it that way.

For more information, see the Viddler developers page.

Note: If you are using Google Reader you may not be able to see this video. The Reader team is dragging their feet on supporting Viddler’s latest embed code. Come on over to my site to see it.

Check out our page and intro video.

Now that has changed. Thanks to Viddler’s own Billy Disney (videographer) and Andrew Smith (designer) we’ve got a brand new Learn More page complete with video.

Billy also wrote a nice blog post explaining the new page.

I’m really proud of some of the stuff coming out of our blog lately and the hits are just going to keep on coming.

Believe it or not Viddler‘s “Super Sys Admin” Todd Troxell uses this text-based, window-less UI full time.

A new video for Viddler’s secure video hosting for businesses. We’ve got a lot in store for Viddler B2B this year and this video is only the tip of the iceberg. More tomorrow, next week and for the rest of this year.

“(Ironically, Engadget’s video demos are only available in Flash. Why would a website devoted to leading-edge gadgetry continue to embed video in a format that can’t be played on the best web-reading gadget? If your video doesn’t play on the iPad, you’re like Steve Allen mocking the lyrics to rock-and-roll songs — an anachronism.)”

That is an excellent question. Why are they embedding their video in a format that isn’t supported on the iPad, or iPhone, or iPod, or Droid or __________ fill in the blank with many other mobile devices? Because Viddler doesn’t support it yet. We’re late for a variety of reasons – some our own fault some third party – but no one likes to play the blame game. So we’ll just focus on the positive.

We’re working on it. And it won’t be very long until Engadget’s blog posts, all of them, work flawlessly on the iPad.

Be sure to check out their other products. Thanks Icon Dock.

/via David Kaneda.

• On Viddler I save videos that I like, that I want Derek (our Community Leader) to see, or that I want to promote to the front page.
• On Flickr I save photos that I like, would like to paint or draw, or want to find again easily.
• On Twitter I save tweets that I like, would like to read later, or that I think are notable in some way.
• On Tumblr (no permalink?) I save posts for the same reason I do tweets. Reading later.
• On Google Reader I star things I want to read later.
• On Facebook I like things that I agree with but have no comment on.

And that is about all of the services that I use on a regular basis or that I favorite things on. With my recent addiction to Instapaper I like less Tumblr and Google Reader items but I still do occasionally.

What about you?

Bernie‘s ‘computer bank’ for Viddler support is pretty awesome.

Duration: ~59minutes

In this presentation I cover how to measure success for a start up in a global market (read: the Internet). I tried my best to give an overview of some of the common pitfalls that startup companies seem to face as well as some possible solutions that have worked for me in my career. I tried to have a little fun too.

Notable links for this presentation would be:

• Viddler’s Business Services Web site
• Viddler’s video analytics announcement
• Wufoo for creating surveys

See also some excellent notes from my presentation by Scott Meade.

LessConf was thoroughly enjoyable and I felt privileged to have been part of it. Thanks to everyone in attendance for putting up with me for an hour.

Back in June 2008 I added an oEmbed service to Viddler. That means that in the next version of WordPress you’ll be able to embed Viddler videos using a very simple embed code like this:

I’m looking forward to updating the Viddler WordPress plugin to support this new schema and make it even easier for WordPress users (such as myself) to embed videos from their favorite video sharing services.

/via Mike Rundle on Twitter.

Random 60: What time do you wake up?

I wake up every morning around 6:45a. I love it. Back in 2006 I was getting up at 7. As I get older, I’m getting up earlier. But really, I enjoy waking up early and getting things accomplished. It is when I work best.

What about you?

Note: No Jeffs were harmed in the making of this video.

• Use your own API. The very best way to make sure your API is equipped with everything one would need to build something of value is to use it yourself. You will find that by using your own API to build your product you will work out a lot of kinks that would otherwise frustrate third-party developers.
• Remove as many learning curves as possible. An example of this is to provide more documentation than you really need to by writing tutorials and not just flat documents. Code examples go a long way too. Provide “wrappers” or frameworks in common languages that help third party developers to “plug and play” with your API.
• Follow standard conventions. This is related to removing learning curves, but you do not go against the grain. Try to utilize as many standards as possible. Chances are any third party developers that use your API will already be familiar with much of what you’re doing.
• Support multiple response types. Do not assume that third party developers will only use the response type that you prefer. Supporting XML, JSON, PHP, and others is not too much more work and yet has a measurable impact on your APIs adoption.
• Create and keep your own conventions. If you have one way to do things try to stick with it all the way through your API. An example of this would be how Twitter recently added a Lists API to their API and used the very same convention of interacting with that API as they do with accounts. This makes integration of new features dead simple and it will be appreciated.
• Add some brains! If there are common actions that must be taken by all third party developers to interact with your API try to build those actions into the API. A good example of this is Flickr’s support for machine tags. Although a third party developer could do all of the work on their end to work with namespaces, predicates, and ultimately the values they are looking for – Flickr makes it easy by doing all of that work on the server-side. Taking the most common actions and rolling them back into the API will slowly build tremendous value in your API.
• Open source as much code as you can. If you build any tools, frameworks, testing applications, products, or anything that uses your API – try to release that stuff as open source. This will help any new third parties to be able to see real examples of products that use your API. It would also be a good idea to promote open source projects to use your API as well so that the entire development community that you build can benefit.
• Communicate with those using your API. Give the developers a clear path to communicate with you about your API, their applications, or anything they may need to get their jobs done. You will learn a lot about what you are lacking that you may have never thought of.
• Drink a lot of caffeine.

These are just a few tips that I’ve learned in working with Viddler‘s development team to build our API. We’re currently working on the next version of our API, dubbed version 2, and we’ll be making massive improvements to the way that the API works, is documented, and how we use it internally. We’ve learned a lot over the last few years and we’re taking all of the tips above and everything we’ve learned from our development community to build what we think is a much more solid offering.

I hope that if you are building an API you can learn from our experience, our failures, and our successes (and I’ll try to share more of them here). If you have anything you’d like to add about good API design please do so in the comments.

The photo of the fire hydrant has nothing to do with this post but I liked it. It is one from my Lincolnton, North Carolina photo set.

Something new from Viddler today. Something we’ve been working on for quite a while. Viddler Analytics is a new feature that makes it easy to understand complex video statistics. Looking forward to seeing how our customer base reacts to this one.

Read more about this feature on The Viddler Blog in a tutorial on how to get the best quality out of this feature called: How to: Set an image as a video thumbnail.

You can see the results on Eat Weird Episode 5. Gorgeous.

Also, this feature is exposed via the Viddler API’s setThumbnail method.

“The Viddler team is using CodeIgniter more and more for our internal PHP projects. Obviously we need to use CodeIgniter with the Viddler API quite a bit so we figured we’d share with you how easy it is to include PHPViddler, the open source PHP API wrapper class for the Viddler API, in your CodeIgniter application.”

Read more in the blog post titled How to: Use the Viddler API with CodeIgniter.

As performed by Viddler member Musicreator. A beautiful piece to play loudly while programming, I assure you.

Viddler all-star Kyle Slattery (right) is back from his semester in Germany. He’s already back at work and back to eating Gombos from The Goose. We’re happy to have him back and to feed him.

Oh yeah, Rob Sandie is in this photo too.