Vodpod Blog

We’ve built a really cool new extension for the Chrome browser that brings the best videos on web found by people you follow on Vodpod to your desktop in real-time.

Get it here, now!

The new extension will add a nice orange Vodpod button to the upper right corner of  your Chrome browser. Once you’ve installed it, you’ll see a notification when someone you’re following has added a video.

Just click on the orange button to see what’s been added and what’s in your feed.

From your feed, click on the video you want to watch.

Right click (Windows) or Ctrl+click if you want to adjust any of the settings.

Following other members on Vodpod has really taken off over the past month. The new Chrome extension makes following other people on Vodpod, and our social video discovery platform, that much more userful and fun.

There’s only one problem with the Chrome extension — it’s addictive! Have fun.

As we’ve recently written, Vodpod is a social video discovery platform. A place where anyone can collect any video from any video sharing site (17,600+ and counting!). A place where you can follow people who collect videos you like, or that match your interests and tastes.

And people have been doing a lot more following lately. While we’ve enabled people to follow others on Vodpod for years, we’ve only recently begun pushing it as our service has reached scale (i.e., enough members collecting enough videos across enough topics).

It’s paying dividends — the number of “follow” actions per day has increased almost 100-fold from 3-4 months ago, and 10-fold from just 3-4 weeks ago.  And  we’re starting to see more of our members gaining more followers.

Yesterday, HoodHollywood became the first Vodpod member to pass 1000 followers. There will be many others passing that mark, and soon.

apologies to raymond carver

We often get asked — by friends, family, potential investors — “What’s Vodpod?”

We know all about the art of the elevator pitch, the need to have a pithy line to throw out. But when you spend most of your waking hours thinking about and working on a service or product, you naturally resist the urge to simplify. It’s hard to distill everything your service is and does into a pithy sentence.

But a conversation with one of our engineers (@aphyr) last week reminded me of the importance of having a simple line or two. He mentioned how hard to explain to his family what he does, and why they might want to use Vodpod.

I thought, “I’ll write down what I say to my friends and share it with the team.” Then I thought: I should just write a blog post.

What’s Vodpod?

A place where people make their own video channels, by collecting videos they  like from 10,000s of sites on the web — including YouTube, Hulu, the BBC, Comedy Central, and more.

Why would I use it?

Because it’s a really great way — the best way, even — to find and watch video. People who make channels on Vodpod comb through the gazillions of videos on the web and find the best stuff — the best so far as their tastes are concerned, their interests.

And because we have nearly a million members, including tens of thousands who collect a lot of videos, you’re likely to find people on Vodpod who share your interests, share your tastes. And through them, you can find great videos you’ll want to watch. You can browse through and watch their collections, and “follow” the people you really like so that you get notified when they add new stuff you.

If you’re interested, you can build your own channel so you can share videos you find on the web with your friends or peers.

How is Vodpod different than YouTube?

The main difference is that people upload video to YouTube; on Vodpod, they collect video from around the web.

Why does that matter? On Vodpod, you’re seeing the very best videos no matter where they are hosted. You’re more likely to find and watch videos of interest to you because you’re watching videos, selected by people on Vodpod for their channels, who share your tastes and interests. Including YouTube videos — in many ways, Vodpod is the best place to find and watch the best YouTube videos.

How is Vodpod different than Facebook?

On Facebook, you’re sharing photos and links and videos with friends, and seeing photos and links and videos your friends share. Some of the things your friends share may be interesting, some not as much.

On Vodpod, you’re watching videos not (only) from friends, but from people who share your tastes and interests. People you might not know, or have never heard of, but who are really really good at finding the best videos. So you’re more likely to find and watch videos you like.

How is Vodpod different than Twitter?

On Twitter, as on Vodpod, you can follow people who share your interests and tastes; not just people who are your friends.

But on Twitter, you’re seeing links to lots of things — photos, blog posts, videos, websites. People you follow might be good at linking to the day’s best blog posts (or, at promoting their own!), but they might not be that good at finding and linking to great videos. That’s what people do on Vodpod.

Also, people are building collections on Vodpod. It’s rarely you go back and look at someone’s “tweets” — but on Vodpod, if you’re in to music, you might get lost for hours watching a collection like this one.

The bottom line is this: if you like watching video — and let’s be honest, who doesn’t — there’s no better service or site for you than Vodpod. We’ll connect you with people on Vodpod who share your tastes and interests, and through them you’ll be able to find great, interesting videos relevant to you and your tastes. From YouTube, and from 10,000s of sites. And, if you’re inspired by them, you can build your own channel and provide the same service for your friends, and for anyone else who share’s your interests, your tastes.

Say hello to our very latest widget, one we’re calling the “Vodpod Social” widget.

It’s designed to show off not just your video collection — but the community around it. That is, the people who are following you on Vodpod.com.

Get it here.

This particular widget is not yet enabled on wordpress.com — but stay tuned, we should have that working next week.

Today we’re excited to announce Vodpod is on the phone, with mobile apps available for both the iPhone and Android phones.

We don’t want to get all Steve Jobs on you, but these new apps offer a revolutionary — dare we say it, magical? — way to find and watch video, no matter where you are.

At the heart of each app is our feed — a stream of videos collected, recommended, or commented on by the people you follow on Vodpod.  Following Vodpod collectors who share your tastes and interests introduces a great new way — the best way, we think –  to find and watch video from 10,000s of sites on the web. It’s social video discovery. And the feed you get when you follow folks on Vodpod is particularly well-suited to the mobile world.

Tapping on a video thumbnail in the feed will take you to a video page, where you can see more details about the video, and collect, comment on, or recommend it — right from your phone.

Oh — and you can watch the video, too! On Android 2.2 phones and higher, which include support for Flash, you’ll be able to watch most videos on Vodpod. On the iPhone — which only supports HTML5 videos — you’ll be able to watch about 70% of the videos in your feed — including videos from sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, blip.tv, Funny or Die, and The Onion among others. As more sites support HTML5 video over the coming months, we expect that number to creep closer to 100%.

In addition to watching videos in your feed, you can browse your collection from the phone so you can show off your favorites to your friends. You can also upload videos you take with your phone to Vodpod. Nifty, eh?

The iPhone and Android apps were developed by Ali Shah and Kyle Kingsbury, respectively. They’re built on the Vodpod API — so others can build similar apps, or incorporate Vodpod into their existing apps. Ali (an intern with us this summer as part of the True Entrepreneur Corps) and Kyle have written posts about their apps with more technical detail if you’re interested. Ali’s post is here, Kyle’s is here.

Of course, the API and these apps are simply manifestations of our underlying Vodpod service and could not exist without it. In that sense, they’re the product of our work as a team, and illustrate the unique data asset built by our members.

Enough cheerleading. What these apps are really about are watching videos — great videos, from 10,000s of sites on the web, curated and chosen by our great collectors. That device in your pocket just got a lot more fun.

There ought to be a more fun, and dependable, way to find videos on the Web or on your phone.

Search is often the wrong tool for video; you can’t search for “keyboard cat” if you don’t yet know about it.

We love our friends on Facebook and the people we follow on Twitter; but they’re sharing so many different things, it’s noisy, and the people we follow or friend aren’t always the best source for videos relevant to our tastes and particular interests.

When we started Vodpod, we thought that by helping people collect and curate video from the web we could invent new ways for people to find and watch video. As we were prepared to launch, we wrote:

We think the best solution is to find videos through people like you — your friends or people with similar tastes, interests, and judgment. [W]hen you build [a video collection]… you make it easier for others with similar interests or tastes to find video they might like. By filtering the good from the bad, applying your judgment, deciding what’s important and what isn’t, and then organizing the results in a way that makes the collection easy and fun to use.

For the first two to three years, we’ve had to focus our efforts on providing the best way to collect video. With over 5.5M videos collected from over 17,500 video sites, our members have built an incredible array of video collections. We’re not declaring “Mission Accomplished” or anything, but that part of our service is rocking.

So we’ve turned our attention increasingly to building a better way to “find and watch” and have made two particularly noteworthy breakthroughs recently:

Connecting the Dots on the Vodpod Graph

With hundreds of thousands of collectors on Vodpod — and tens of thousands maintaining especially deep collections — we’re able to connect you with the right collector so that you can get a video feed tailored to your interests and tastes. Whether you’re interested in soccer, politics, viral videos, technology, motorsport, 3D graphics engines, electronica or something more obscure.

To get a sense of how this works, visit my collection and click the big sign up button. We’ll recommend other collectors for you to follow based on the member’s profile page you’re visiting (in this case, mine) — not just other members I’m following, but members like me, with tastes and interests similar to mine:

Our ability to connect you to other people on Vodpod with increasing sophistication would not be possible without the deep video collections, annotated with rich metadata, curated by our members. If people are nodes in social graphs, our “nodes” are particularly unique — they allow us to build a more comprehensive video discovery map than anyone else. In short: Collections Matter.

Inline Playback from the Vodpod Feed

Once you’ve connected with some Vodpod members and have started following them, you see a feed of the videos they collect on your Vodpod home page. The feed itself is similar to those you use on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Buzz — with the difference that it’s video centric, and enables you to watch videos from 10,000s of sites right from your Vodpod home page.

You can watch, comment on, recommend and collect videos curated by people you follow from your Vodpod home page.

With these two new features, we’ve seen significant changes in how Vodpod is being used. While we’ve offered the ability to “follow” other members for years, there’s been an explosion in the number of members following other members and in the number of videos watched and collected and commented on from the feed over the past couple of weeks.

It’s not hard to understand why. It’s a new and more fun and pleasing way to find and watch video. Social video discovery, perhaps. Try it out — we’d love to hear what you think.

Legions of online businesses are following this trend right now as they attempt to integrate game mechanics into their products. Investors used to hear customer acquisition plans that included, “and we’re going to make it social” or “and we’re going to make it viral.” But lately, these pitches have changed to include, “and we’re going to use game mechanics” to address customer acquisition and engagement.

At worst, copycat “game mechanics” will quickly become annoying and trite…

From “How to Use Game Mechanics to Power Your Business” on Mashable.com

Knowing that everyone and their cousin in the startup community has now studied Foursquare and developed plans to ape their check-in and “badges” system for every activity under the sun, you might ask: “What kind of douchebag startup [sorry, Mom!] would launch a game mechanics, badge-driven feature now?”

We’re just the people for the job.

Of course, being a bunch of nerdy boys hipsters, we’re two steps of cleverness ahead of y’all. Want proof? We’ve got the “Playa” badge for anyone who has collected 25 hip-hop videos. Only glitch is that Scott keeps pronouncing it “PLY-uh” — which makes us think of this video.

So don’t write us off as your typical SOMA-dwelling, fixie-riding, imitative, hop-on-the-next bandwagon startup dudes with cool Dutch architect glasses. Oh no. We’re located in the Financial District and we ride the MUNI. And we’ve been on to this badge thing for a long time now, and have been hatching our plans for years.

It all started in the Spring of 2007 with a visit to an eminent Silicon Valley VC on Sand Hill Road. We were ushered into the inner sanctum, the lights were lowered, we proceeded to show our wares. Videos, collecting, embed codes, blog widgets — we were on fire. Until, 10 minutes into our presentation, the VC partner looked up, his face bathed in reflected light from our slides (cue mental picture of Kurtz), and said in a sotto voce rasp: “You need to think about Skinner Boxes.”

We left the meeting, got in our car, and said: “What the f*%# are Skinner Boxes?”

So we went back to the office and Googled it, and watched this:

We spent much of 2007, 2008 and 2009 trying to figure out how to give our members a pellet every time they collected a video, with an extra pellet thrown in if they collected something good. We evaluated postal rates, pellet shipping containers, pneumatic tube schemes — and in a burst of creative brainstorming one afternoon, delivery by carrier pigeon. Until we realized those were extinct.

We had a real Homer Simpson moment when we saw that Foursquare service for the first time. What a clever way to avoid shipping all those pellets.

So, as of today, we have badges on Vodpod.

We even have a Pigeon Badge.

Just keep collecting videos, you’ll get our Pigeon Badge. Sometime. Really. We promise.

For the last year, we’ve been working on new ways to identify and recognize our members who are doing a particularly good job collecting videos. We’ve added category and sub-category pages that showcase both recent activity and top users, and helpful lists that identify folks you might want to follow.

We’ve also wanted to make Vodpod more fun to use.

Like so many other folks (see our related post on that here) we were inspired and entertained by the cleverness of Foursquare‘s badges.  And, we’ve admired how StackOverflow uses both points and badge-like achievements to provide a handy guide to their best members. We tried to take the best ideas from those services, and re-work them to fit the needs of our members and the culture of our service in building our own points and badges system, which we launch today:

Our badges reward video collecting, of course. There are basic, and easy-to-earn, badges for getting your collection started. And  others that reward your collecting prowess in particular categories — music, politics, tech, sports, and anime — or in particular endeavors (such as “first discoveries” or collecting videos from a wide range of sites).  And there is the elusive Pigeon Badge. We plan to add  badges for more categories and types of achievements in the coming weeks and months. Send us your ideas.

In addition to our badges, we’ve also introduced a points system on Vodpod. You earn points when videos you have collected are re-collected by other Vodpod users. You also earn bonus points if your video becomes popular.  More details here if you’re interested.

On your account page, we’ll show you how other members you’re following are doing:

We’ve also added leaderboards for categories and sub-categories based on points earned over the past 30 days:

You earn points in a specific category when you collect a video relevant to the category, which in turn gets re-collected by others. If you collect a Saturday Night Live video, for example, which is then recollected by others and goes popular, you’ll earn points in the “Funny” category.

Like all good badges and points systems, there is a game here to be played. What’s the best way to win more points, earn more badges?

Build a following on Vodpod. Invite friends or others who share your tastes and interests to join Vodpod and follow you. Encourage your followers to re-collect the videos they like.

We’d also encourage you to follow other members you like, and re-collect videos from them. It’s nice to earn points for videos you’ve collected; it’s nicer still to help other members by spreading their discoveries.

Re-collecting videos on Vodpod is a little like a re-tweet on Twitter, a “Like” on Facebook, or a “re-blog” on Tumblr; it’s both a means of self-expression, and a way to spread ideas and interesting videos.

Of course, we recognize this won’t be of interest to everyone. If you don’t like all this, just ignore it and keep using Vodpod the way you always have.

But, we’ve added badges, points and leaderboards because they meet our key criteria — making the service more fun, and more useful. We hope most of you will agree.

We’ve been spending some time this summer thinking through “what’s next” for Vodpod — what new features should we build, what new services should we offer? As part of that planning effort, we decided to ask some of our members what they thought about Vodpod and thought it would be interesting to share some of what we learned here.

We used the very simple and effective Survey I/O developed by KISS Metrics and Sean Ellis. As Sean notes on his blog:

The key question on the survey is:

How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?

1. Very disappointed
2. Somewhat disappointed
3. Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)
4. N/A – I no longer use [product]

Happily, almost all of the respondents said they’d be disappointed if they couldn’t use Vodpod; 60% said they’d be “very disappointed” and another 35% said they’d be “somewhat disappointed.”

But it was the answers to the follow up questions that were most illuminating to us, and reminded us of the core benefits of our service.

• That our members like Vodpod because we offer the best, and easiest-to-use, tool for collecting and aggregating your favorite videos from the Web. Not just from YouTube, or three to four other sites, but literally from 1000s of sites.
• That members build collections to share them — with their friends, peers, or the world, and on their blogs, Facebook and on Vodpod.
• That it’s fun – and useful – to find and watch videos collected by other members.

These people-powered collections represent the next wave in how we discover and watch video online. Early video sharing sites, YouTube being the most notable example, gave videomakers a place to upload and host their videos, and an entirely new way to build an audience. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook gave friends new ways to share the videos they found on these sites.

And now aggregation sites like ours represent a new, third path. Vodpod members like 101GreatGoals (with over 40,000 soccer clips), Talking Points Memo (with over 6000 politics videos) and HoodHollywood (with over 23,000 hip-hop related videos) represent the future of  video. You don’t need a broadcast tower or satellite delivery system to build a video channel in the 21st century; you just need a Vodpod.

There are other video aggregators, with new ones launched every week. Some have gotten more attention and more hype; but it’s clear at this point that none are as big or important as Vodpod. We have more members, who collect more videos, from more sites, seen by more people than any other service. We’re not hanging a “Mission Accomplished” banner just yet, we’re simply noting our position.

Sites like YouTube and Hulu and blip.tv and Vimeo will remain the best places to upload your videos if you’re a publisher or videomaker. Services like Twitter and Facebook will continue to provide a great way for you to share a video here and there with your friends.

We intend to stay focused on our core mission — making the best service for building a video collection that you want to share with others. A collection made with videos from any video sharing site. A collection that can be shared anywhere you like (including Vodpod.com) and viewed on any device (computer, smartphone, and television).

Stay tuned for more.

Your Vodpod collection just got a whole lot more fun to browse:

Friends, peers, visitors can now surf and watch your video collection. And comment.

And re-collect the video from you (which will benefit you).