August 1st, 2007, 3 Comments »
Over on Travis’s blog, I read about Simplify Media. Crap name, good product. From Travis:
There’s a cool program, for Mac and PC, that lets you see my iTunes library and listen to songs from it. It’s called Simplify Media.
With it, you can share your music with up to 30 friends. So far, I have about five friends (not in life, I mean with this iTunes sharing). And as long as my computer’s on and SM is running, you can browse and play my music, and I can do the same with yours.
I’m currently listening to Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” courtesy of Travis’s crapload of music. I have no right to judge anybody’s taste in music, but All Saints? The whole album? Really?
Anyhow, I thought it’d be fun to connect with other users who are Simplify users, or want to try it. We could all ‘invite’ each other, and form an ad hoc network of our iTunes libraries. I’ve only got a subset of my library on my laptop (Simplify Media, how about an API that MP3Tunes can talk to?), but I’m glad to let others listen.
My user name is ‘dbarefoot’, and Travis’s is ‘nep’.
Hmm…I’m having some network buffering issues. Don’t know if that’s Malta Cable’s fault, or Simplify Media’s?
3 Comments »
March 22nd, 2007, 8 Comments »
In the past six months, I must have gotten pitched with a half dozen travel video sharing sites over at Geeky Traveller. They all did more or less the same thing, and they were all battling YouTube for a chunk of the video action.
The other day, James sent me the cleverly named Yaaway (a play, of course, on a Hebrew name for God). I gather that they still haven’t officially launched, but here are some initial impressions:
- Every video is reasonably well produced, and makes use (too much use, actually) of cuts, camera moves and video effects. They don’t look like the standard grainy YouTube video–they’re going beyond the static, unedited dude talking into a webcam. I assume all of this is seeded content.
- There’s no indication of who’s behind Yaaway. I can’t even determine where they’re located or the denomination of the site creators. At least one of the videos I watched is shot in Vancouver, so they may be local.
- They’re not shy about the proselytizing. I found this video a little uncomfortable, as this former Muslim describes how he came to Christianity.
- There are no user feedback mechanisms in place. I trust they’ll fix this before launch.
I started wondering how many such sites there were, and (courtesy of BlogMinistry) found three more: GodTube (”Broadcast Him”), Jesus Clips (his toenails?) and iQuestions (somebody will answer for that name in the hereafter). GodTube and Jesus Clips both emulate YouTube’s functionality. The former seems to be the big player in the space, while the latter features some downright scary stuff.
In truth, the whole thing could be a well-devised prank. The top viewed video on GodTube is farcical in its argument against atheism. On the other hand, these Apple parodies aren’t bad.
iQuestions is the most liberal of the sites, as far as I can figure. They’ve got a whole intimacy section (get your questions answered by old white dudes in sweaters!) that is, as these things go, fairly provocative.
I imagine that there are dozens of emerging video sharing categories. There are also regional video silos, like Video.ca. What else have you seen?
8 Comments »
