Evan Sims

Viddler’s Facebook app goes to Beta

Everyone’s favorite video sharing community Viddler unveiled it’s new Facebook app yesterday to a select number of beta testers. Colin made use of Twitter and Pownce to invite people to the test, and the demand has been quite impressive.

The Viddler app is everything a Facebook app should be; it integrates seamlessly, is easy to use, and provides a legitimate use. It’s essentially a front end to much of what you can do on Viddler already; you can record and post videos from your webcam right in Facebook, you can watch videos your friends have posted, and you can share videos you have posted yourself with visitors to your profile. Nothing new that you couldn’t do before, but now it’s all wrapped up and tightly integrated, so you can access everything Viddler has to offer without having to leave Facebook.

Here’s a video I recorded from within Facebook using the app:

The quality, as usual, is pretty damn good; what’s more, it’s ridiculously simple to record videos like this. Congratulations to the Viddler team; you’ve done another bang up job here and really raised the bar for video on Facebook.

Want an invite to the beta? Add me on Facebook and let me know.

Enough Said?

No, it isn’t mine; it’s actually a Mother’s Day present from my Dad, Sister and I. Still, the thing is insanely sexy to use. I can feel it slowly breaking my will, especially with the local Best Buy carrying Macs now. >_<

Brightkite is Slick

Finally got an invite to Brightkite tonight (thanks Jeff!), and I’m pretty damn impressed to say the least. The best way to describe Brightkite is something like a mash-up of Plazes, Twitxr and to some degree Twitter itself, though it’s much more of a companion to the former than it is a competitor.

Basically, you decide to broadcast that you are at some geographical location using your laptop or cellphone (i.e. The Starbucks on Green); you can see who else is there right now or has been in the recent past, and you can share photos and notes during your time there. It’s sort of an ad-hoc virtual community based around physical locations. The best thing? It all integrates with Twitter and FireEagle, so now your “I’m at Barnes and Noble” messages can actually have some useful metadata attached- who else is there? Where is that Barnes and Noble located? What does it’s interior look like?

So, it’s essentially a stalkers best friend, right? Well, luckily the Brightkite team was smart enough to impliment some decent privacy controls- you can define how much information you want to give out to the public, your friends, or your “trusted friends”.

I really love Brightkite; it’s not just a great idea, but their implementation is brilliant. The UI is responsive and sleek, and it doesn’t feel like a chore keeping it up to date, a problem I always had with Plazes. My only complaint is the lack of an API right now. I’d love to hook a certain GPS project of mine into this bad boy and have it automated some of the aspects. But, like all things 2.0, I’m sure they’re working on it.

Action… Jeans?

I got’s to get me a pair of those Chuck Norris ACTION JEANS. There’s nothing worse than getting your pants bunched up right when you need to perform a round house kick. I know from personal experience.

SmugMug gets a Flash player- and it doesn’t suck!

Earlier this evening Don MacAskill twittered that SmugMug released it’s new Flash-based video player and I must say, it’s very slick indeed. Not many folks realize that SmugMug supports video, but it does a real bang up job of it. If you’re a Power or Pro account holder, you can upload videos up to 2.5 or 10 minutes in length respectively. They don’t cheat you on the quality, either; as long as it’s less than 512MB in size, they’ll take your video up to true HD resolution (1280×720) and encode it in H.264, which is quickly becoming the most popular video compression codec.

SmugMug won’t scale your video to an ugly resolution, or artifact the crap out of it to save space on their servers. It’s just your videos, in great quality, without the bullshit.

Alright, alright; all my sweet nothings about their service aside, I really like what the SmugMug did here. The interface is sleek an unobtrusive, it’s quick to load/buffer/whatever (not sure how that works in Flash exactly, especially since you’re loading an external video file) and… have I mentioned the quality? ;)

Below is a glimpse of their new Flash-based player in “web resolution” (425×240), which I only chose because of limitations in my own site’s design. Regardless, hit up this page to see it in all of it’s HD glory.

If you want to give SmugMug a try, there’s a free 14 day trial. I recently made the switch from Flickr, and I totally recommend it.