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The Virtual Couch Potato
“Let’s get together and feel all right.”
Bob Marley
Video entertainment is social. When we’re in front of a television set, we are often with someone. How many times have you felt “left out” when all your friends watched that show last night and you missed it?
So far, viewing video on the Internet has been pretty solitary. You watch your video, have a chuckle and move onto the next. If you’re feeling particularly impressed, you send an email or IM to your friends with a link to the video – and that’s the extent of it. I’ve even gone to parties where we’ve klutzily attached our computers to a projector (“borrowed” from work) and gathered on couches to uncomfortably navigate through clips together. That’s just an example of how much we want to share our videos with our friends.
We love to laugh together, be amazed together, horrified and excited together. Those shared experiences are some of the most entertaining moments for us. Unfortunately, that shared experience is hard to come by online today.
So what can we do about it? Well, Facebook, for one, has taught us some important lessons through its success. Why is it that viewing photos is better on Facebook? It’s because Facebook has placed viewing photos in the context of our social engagement. It’s not just about viewing photos – when I post and tag a photo on Facebook, someone else often comments on it. Another friend is notified that someone commented my photo – so curiosity gets the best of them and they go see what the photo is about. As they surf over to see this photo, they find five others that are interesting and comment on those too … and so the cycle continues.
Facebook has masterfully recreated the simple act of looking through a photo album as a family and placed it online so that we can share or albums seamlessly with our networks. They have done it by creating a set of communication tools that are simple to use and make it easy for us to connect with friends and family everywhere.
The world needs the same thing for Internet video – a set of community tools surrounding video that make it easy for us to recreate the experience of sitting on the couch or dishing at the watercooler. It’s all about recreating the togetherness of watching a great show – except with your friends everywhere in the world – from the ones down the street to the ones in Rio de Janeiro.
These tools have to encompass the full video experience. They have to capture the moment, but also capture what comes before and what comes after you watch the show. The beautiful thing about creating those tools is that they take advantage of one of the things that the internet is brilliant at – connecting people. Our laughs, our tears, our outrage, and our enthusiasm can all be shared with people we know and love (or not) … anywhere in the world.
Posted by Mike Volpi on Aug 26, 08 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Comments (2)
Tom Limongello:
Facebook will also help us move beyond picture commenting, the most recent redesign makes the comment stream more visible for more features, such as Posted Items, and when the iPhone 2.0 Application launches people will be able to see and share the same things wherever they are, on the couch, at their desk, on the bus etc.
Posted by: Tom Limongello | Aug 27, 08
Angel Leon:
The one thing that makes the difference with Facebook pictures, is the fact that photo tags always are about the people in the tags, unlike flickr where you just have text tags, or comments, Facebook tags work like hyper lynks. Whoever came with this simple idea was brilliant.
However, this idea is probably not applicable with the video world, the people in the video will not be any of the people in our social graph, but maybe, just maybe, there's a way to leave notes on videos for our friends... e.g.
Say you're talking to your friend about a certain quote on a movie quote at work, next time you see the movie on joost, you could pause it and leave a note around a certain timestamp specifically for your friend. If your friend has "friend notes" enabled, as he watches the show, he will get an overlay with your note "This is what I was talking about the other day"... or better yet, you'll be able to have all this notes on your Joost Inbox, when you open them, you'll see the message and there will be a hyperlynk to the video on that specific timestamp. Then again, it should just work between friends, otherwise it becomes a mess as we've seen on other sites where the notes on video can come from anyone, and you can't tell who said what.
My two cents about those social tools
Posted by: Angel Leon | Sep 8, 08