Vidista Launches to the Public!

Vidista officially launched to the public yesterday, and already new users have signed up and started storing, organizing, and sharing their favorite online videos! Vidista should become even more interesting as users connect with each other, start posting on each other's channels, and share the site with even more friends.

To get a taste of what's new, you might want to learn French with Punky Brewster, dis the establishment with Audience of Two, or tie up some political odds and ends.

Also, an upgraded version of the Vidista Button is in the works which will allow you to add new videos to your library without having to leave YouTube. It's very cool, and very unique.

More coming soon!

Vidista to Launch October 1, 2007

After several additional months of tweaking and preparation, Vidista is finally ready for an official public launch! Pre-registered users can still access the site, but new users will have to wait until October 1, 2007 to sign up.

In the meantime, you can watch this preview to see how Vidista works.

Those of you who tried out the site while it was in development will also find several new features that should significantly improve your experience.

Invite Friends
The best thing about online videos is how easy they are to share with your friends. Now you can quickly and easily invite your friends to join Vidista and share videos with you!


You'll find a new "Invite Friends" link up at the top that will bring you to a page with several invitation options:


The buttons on the left allow you to instantly send invites to your Facebook and YouTube friends. You can also copy and paste your invite link into e-mails, IMs, or your website. When your friends click on the link, they will automatically be added to your friends.

Shared Channels
Now that you've invited all of your friends to join Vidista, you're going to want them to share their favorite online videos with you. Of course, you'll be able to see all of their channels in your "Favorites" panel, but you now have the option of letting your friends edit your channels as well.


By selecting this option, you give your friends permission to add, delete, and rearrange the videos in this channel's playlist. For instance, you could create an empty dropbox channel where friends can add videos they think you'll enjoy. Or, you could create a channel that ranks the best music videos online, and let your friends fight over which ones they think deserve to be on the list. There are a lot of possibilities!

Group Accounts
If you know a specific group of people who you think would enjoy sharing videos with each other, consider creating a group account for them. You can sign up for a new Vidista account, and then invite your group to become friends with the new account. Just remember to choose the "Allow friends to edit this playlist" option on all of your channels, and your group will be able to collaboratively organize and share videos. This idea works great when you want to share videos with classmates, co-workers, friends, or family members!

I'm very excited to add these new collaborative features, and I can't wait to see what people do with them in the weeks to come!

Introducing Vidista Channel Search

Vidista now has a Channel Search bar at the bottom of the left panel, which lets you search Vidista channels by title, description, and even the videos in their playlists. For example, let's say you're looking for SNL Digital Shorts. Another user might have called her channel "Funny Skits," but if one of the videos in her playlist matches your search query, it will still show up in the results. Let's search for the keyword "snl":


There are two search buttons, one labeled "Search" and the other labeled with a "Pop Out" icon. When you press Enter or click "Search," your results will appear in the player window, and you never leave Vidista. If you're in the middle of playing a video, however, you might want to click the "Pop Out" button, which will open your results in a new window. Here we'll just click "Search":


You can start playing a channel immediately by clicking on its link, or you can click the "Add to Favorites" option to add it to your Favorite Channels list. This is helpful if you want to check out a bunch of channels without repeating your search.

As more channels appear on Vidista, you can expect this search feature to become increasingly useful. Try out Channel Search for yourself!

Google just made Vidista better, again

In this case, it was actually an improvement on YouTube's side that has made Vidista even easier to use. YouTube recently updated its embeddable Flash player so that at the end of each video, or any time you click on the "Menu" button in the lower right corner, you'll see thumbnail icons for a handful of related videos. If you click on one, the video begins playing immediately in the same player. But best of all for Vidista users, you can copy the video's URL or embed code and paste it into Vidista immediately to add the new video to your Library, without ever having to leave Vidista.

You can read more about the new player at Google Operating System:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/06/youtube-launches-new-embedded-player.html

Vidista presented at Mass Technology Leadership Council (MTLC) Board Retreat

As part of Dan Bricklin's presentation about the "Facebook Generation" at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council Board of Trustees Retreat, he invited me and my friend to show the board how we use the web. I chose to demonstrate how I've been using popular websites like Digg, Facebook, and YouTube, to create and publicize my own websites, including CoolMove.org, ClimateVideos.com (coming soon), and Vidista.com. If you're interested, you can download my PowerPoint presentation by clicking here.

Dan also showed off Vidista by going through the entire process of filming a short video clip live, posting it on YouTube, and then adding it to his Vidista channel (embedded below). The whole thing was a very cool experience, I met a number of very interesting people, and I got to see some exciting things that will be available soon.

Thanks again to Dan for inviting me to participate!

DanB's channel:

Google just made Vidista better

Google has recently been implementing a variety of updates to their services, including a new navigation bar at the top of its pages, a web history manager, "iGoogle," and others. For Vidista users, however, one of the most exciting new features may be the addition of thumbnail images for videos that appear in Google Search results. This seems to be part of Google's "move towards Universal Search," which is supposed to combine search results from a variety sources. Since you can use Vidista to search for results specifically from YouTube or Google Video, this new feature can help you quickly and efficiently find the videos you're looking for.

While this feature appears to still be in a trial mode, and may or may not appear for all users, I'm hoping that Google will adopt it as a standard feature.

Try out Vidista Video Search to find new videos to add to your Library.

What does an embedded channel look like?

Vidista not only lets you watch channels that you and others have created, it also lets you embed those videos into other websites and blogs. You can find the snippet of HTML code at the bottom right of the bottom panel once you've selected a channel. Simply copy and paste this snippet into the HTML of your site or blog. If you're using Blogger, for instance, you will need to click the "Edit HTML" tab while composing your post.

Here is what your channel will look like:

If you want to get even fancier, you can make your channel play automatically by editing the part of the snippet that says "auto=0" to "auto=1", and you can start the channel playing with a specific video by changing "index=0" to "index=n", where "n" is the index number of the video (starting from 0).

You could even design a whole website around your channel, and whenever you update the content of your channel in Vidista, your changes are automatically applied to the embedded channel on your site!