Viddler

After his first week away from his job in… ever, Gary Vaynerchuk has returned with episode #686 of Wine Library TV (subscribe).

With just a Flip video camera, three bottles of Italian varietals in America, and a super duper special guest whom will make this the greatest episode of Wine Library TV in the history of the show!

This episode begins with a 2005 Rosa D’Oro Barbera, followed by a 2005 Due Vigne Dolcetto, and finishes with a 2007 Andrew Will Annie Camarda from Washington. Well, it finishes with his special guest which I’m sure you’ll have guessed who it is.

Have you made a really exciting video lately? A rant? A huge event in your life? Tell me all about it by sending me a message.

In the week leading up to April 1st we held a competition open to everyone in which you had to fool the audience of your video that you were being honest.

I’ve held all of you in suspense for long enough, so let’s announce the winners.

Foolery: Ultimate Edition

Rog42 from Sydney, Australia, tricked us in to believing that we could get a discount from Microsoft by getting a tattoo behind our ear. He really does work for Microsoft, so was really sly. See his video below.

Rog42 scored himself the option between a ThinkGeek OR Amazon gift card to the value of $100 and a Viddler t-shirt! Giddy up!

The Cheeky Tricks

The only other participant in this contest was CheekTV. Their April Fools’ Day video was featured here on the blog and showed some fantastic ways to prank your friends in and around the home. Nice! Watch CheekTV’s video below.

What? That’s it? Yup! Now we’ve got all these spare t-shirts we’ll have to figure out what to do with. Participate next time, yo.

Here’s the video the won Rog42 the rad prize:

Here’s the video that won CheekTV sweet Viddler schwag:

Hello Viddlers! We’re happy to finally announce the release of version 2.46 of the Viddler platform. We released this update on April 1st, no joke intended, and have made a few small updates since then to stabilize the release.

This release one of our more complex releases in recent months. Where version 2.45 included 42 “tickets” 2.46 included 112! We’re constantly working very hard to keep the number of tickets in each release at a manageable level - but the main feature of this release is the cause for such a large amount of work.

Unicode Support. Every part of Viddler’s platform is now fully unicode compatible. This means that our player, web site, API, all now support international characters. So to those of you that require that support welcome!

Age gate. Some material is not meant for all audiences. Some is even governed by law to be shown only to those of a certain age. We’ve worked with our partners and business clients to create an age gate, or a simple splash screen that appears before the video to ask the viewer their age, so that they can better serve their audiences. Viddler partner Destructoid (destructoid) is using it here, as an example. (If you are logged into Viddler and have set your birthday you may not see the Age gate). Also: For a general overview of the feature you can watch Rob Sandie’s quick Age gate overview.

Billing updates for Business clients. We’re constantly updating our business offerings, services, support features, and now we’ve just made a big update to our billing processes. Billing is now being done in an automated fashion with the option to pay via Credit Card automatically every month. We expect to continue to update these processes in the next few releases.

API security and original file access updates. Our API is being updated with every release of the Viddler platform. Several business clients have asked for their accounts to be completely hidden from Viddler.com for various reasons. To that end we’ve added more security to the API to keep their data secure and private. We’ve also added original file access to the API responses for those that need it. For more information on the Viddler API see the Viddler Developers Web site.

Speaking of the API, you can now generate your own API key! No need to request an API key from the Viddler staff anymore (something we had a lot of trouble keeping up with the requests for). Now, just log into your account, go to your settings page, and generate an API key! It is now even easier to become a developer on top of Viddler’s platform.

With over 112 tickets in this release we also managed to fit in a number of bug fixes, more efficient processes (like reducing the amount of memory that our player uses), and have taken another step into fighting the spam messages we’ve all seen on Viddler. We’re actively working on version 2.47 already and we hope you enjoy some of these new changes!

Hello Viddlers! We’re updating the site to version 2.46. We’ll be down for a little while during this update. Stay tuned to this post or to Twitter for updates.

Viddler is at SXSW Interactive 2009!

Rachel (Community Support) and myself (Community Leader) will be frolicking in the streets and buildings of Austin, Texas, throughout the South by Southwest Interactive conference this year.

Last year billions of minutes of video was uploaded/imported via sxswvideos.com during and after the conference. Of course, this year we’d like to see zillions of minutes of video. That way people that can’t attend the event can still enjoy all awesome fun that goes on there. Okay, nothing is like being at an event, but video gets darn close!

Attendees: Make sure you add the tag ‘sxsw‘ to your videos to ensure they appear on sxswvideos.com for everyone to see in a single page. You can also amend the tag with various categories on the SXSW Videos site, such as Introduction — just add the tags ‘sxsw‘ & ‘sxswintroduction‘ for it to appear on the front page of sxswvideos.com and under the Introduction category. Now would be a good time to introduce yourself in a video. Go go go!

If you want to learn more about sxswvideos.com, just visit the great post ‘How to use SXSWVideos.com‘ that Colin wrote.

Lastly, follow @Viddler on Twitter for updates on our whereabouts!

We’ll see ya in the streets and at the shindigs, y’all!

Hello! I’m Andrew Smith (catch me on Viddler or Twitter), Viddler’s designer and front-end coder. I’ve been asked to write this post, so you’re stuck with me for today (unfortunate, yes, but it cannot be helped).

Recently, the team launched a new version of Viddler, complete with redesigned navigation. I’m going to give you a glimpse of how the revised navigation was designed and built, and what little details make it really special from a usability standpoint.

(more…)

As you have no doubt already noticed, some things have changed here on Viddler. Some of the changes we’ve recently released are visual - while others are not so visual. So that’s what we’re here to tell you about - the stuff you may not know we’ve updated.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. The navigation has changed! And yes, it has. We have an entirely new, thinner, easier-to-use, navigation menu system. We love it we hope you do too. But I’m not going to tell you any more about it since Andrew Smith, our Lead Designer here at Viddler, is working on an extra special blog post about the new navigation system.

What else has changed? As a point of reference this version, which we internally refer to as 2.45, had over 42 separate tickets (or tasks, bugs, features). Here are some of the highlights:

A number of API updates. For all of you Viddler Developers and Viddler Business clients - these updates to our API are a welcome one. We’ve added a few arguments to help you filter results using our API. First, getByUser now accepts tag filtering! This makes is much easier to find specific videos from within a user’s account. Both getByUser and getByTag now have a sort argument that allows for sorting results by two main data points: views and date uploaded.

Our Partners are getting a few really great updates to our Advertising capabilities. You may have noticed we have a new ad unit on some of the pages here on Viddler, but we also have markedly increased the number of ad units that we can support in our video player. Pre-rolls, post-rolls, 20% overlays and more are now available to our Partners and Business clients. If you’d like to inquire about these units please contact support. If you’d like to purchase some adverts - see our Advertising page.

The updates to the API and our players have also trickled down into our Viddler Vidgets (the easiest way to create a site widget for Viddler!). Now you can filter by tags on a username, sort by views or uploaded date, and many more new features have been added. There is even a new style for the list view. We have another update to Vidgets coming out soon - so please stay tuned for that.

CAPTCHA! We know how much the spam that you’ve seen on Viddler has put you off. It has put us off too. We’ve got a several-step plan that we’re working on in order to eliminate the vast majority of spam here on Viddler as well as making it even less likely that you’ll see it at all. The first step in this plan has been to add captcha, or a service that forces you to type in a few random words to validate that you’re a human, to our forums and messaging services.  This is not a permanent feature but we’ll be leaving it in place as we work through the rest of our plan to help out with the spam.

We have done several updates for our Business clients including automatic invoicing, enhanced privacy features, the first step into much more rich statistic analysis, and other key features that our Business clients have been asking for. Each of our releases will always address the needs of our Business clients to the best of our abilities and we’re happy that version 2.45 of our platform has addressed more of their needs than ever before.

Although not related to this release I thought it important to mention that the Viddler Wordpress plugin is now on the official Wordpress plugin directory.  This means that you can install and update our plugin from within the Wordpress admin! Oh, if you’re inclined to rate our plugin 5 stars we wouldn’t be against that.

As was mentioned we have made a number of smaller updates that you may never notice - but we’re happy to have squashed those bugs for you. Until our next update, thanks for using Viddler.

As a child I would get up early on Sunday mornings and watch the top 40 music videos for the week. It was a lot of fun to see the video that goes with the music I would hear on commercial radio stations.

In light of that, I thought about making featured videos on Sundays a music video. It would be something to relax to after a nice Sunday sleep-in. Right?

I asked what everyone thought about having music videos on a Monday and the response was “For The Win!”

There is a lot of independent and signed music videos on Viddler and what better way to rock the start of the week with an awesome beat featured on the front page of Viddler and here on the blog.

Of course, some Monday afternoons might have a second video, so you have something giddy to look forward to after making it through that Mondayitus.

Moreover, everyone get giddy about Music Video Mondays on Viddler! And if you have any suggestions, just send me a message or leave a link to them on this post!

Woo!

Happy Holidays everyone!

No doubt you’re gearing up to visit your loved ones very soon or snuggle up with the ones you live with. I’m going to be in Texas! Yeehaa!

I feel that everyone should let their inner child go wild for the Christmas Contest this year! So I’d like everyone to make a video when they go and meet Santa to ask him for something this year.

Add the tag averygiddyxmas2008 and post it to the What I Want For Christmas group before January 7th and you may just win a glorious gift basket created personally by members of The Viddler Team!

Here’s a video I made with the instructions:

Don’t leave your video until the last minute. Go out and meet Santa today.

Happy *insert your holiday here*!

When we launched our new player that allows you to customize the colors, add your logo, and link back to your site - only some of these features were made immediately available in our Simple Player.

Although we’re a little late to announce this, we’re proud to let you know that the same customizations that you’ve made to our full, or normal, player are now showing up in the Simple Player as well.

As you can see in the above example, a recent blind tasting by Gary Vaynerchuk on Wine Library TV, the same colors and logo are now showing up on the Simple Player.

Sorry for being slow to announce this but we hope that those of you that want to use our Simple Player are now enjoying it even more than before.