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January 30, 2006
FireAnt is catching fire!
Its been a long week at camp FireAnt.
We launched new versions of our software for Mac and Windows (Download Now), and also a shiny new website at FireAnt.tv. The website is the most significant upgrade. It is sort of like a "TV Guide" for videoblogs. Users can log in to rate and tag channels and episodes, and also build a personal Queue of episodes to download a la carte with FireAnt. Over time we will add lots of new features to help people discover video and share with friends.
But, before we get to that stuff we need to upgrade our server. Its been running pretty hot due to the heavy traffic we're getting from sites like Digg.com and others. We've done as much optimizing as we can. Now we know we need to take it up a notch and throw more iron at it (the server we're using was something I rent at $50/mo. anyway).
Even though we're dealing with all the feedback and trying to hold our server together, the response has been extremely positive. I can't say enough how good it feels to simply ship code out into the wild. Now that we've got the basis of the platform up and running we'll be able to expand on top of it and make it a little better each week.
On that note, our first seemingly small improvement is actually something not small at all... we've added a 1-click subscription method. The great thing about it is that it's really easy. Check out our Really Simple Subscription Button Maker. Enter your feed URL, copy the code, and paste it into your site. That's it!
When a user clicks this button it will launch a little popup window containing a short explanation of subscription, a link to download FireAnt if they don't already have it, and a link to launch FireAnt and auto-subscribe to the RSS channel (so its actually 2-clicks).
You can check it out in the sidebar of my blog right here!
More to come, so stay tuned....
Posted by jkinberg at 8:19 PM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2006
Greasemonkeying Reuters Video
I got a ton of responses when I posted a couple Greasemonkey scripts to download videos from Google Video and YouTube a while back... mostly because the blog entry made it to the front page of Digg.com. Since then I've gotten tons of requests to make scripts to download videos from all sorts of different sites.... Here's another to download videos from Reuters:
As usual, this is a Greasemonkey script, so you'll need Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Then you can simply right-click the above link and choose, "install user script".
Once installed, this script will place a download link at the top of any page of http://today.reuters.com/tv/. You can right-click the link to save the Flash video (FLV) file to your computer. You can then play the video with an FLV player like this one. Or you could transcode the video to another format to edit or take with you on a portable device using something like this.
See the screenshot below to see what this script does:
Posted by jkinberg at 12:43 PM | Comments (3)
January 20, 2006
Advertising in the wild
An example of advertising in new media.
Heavy.com has what looks like a Beta version a social network, MySpace-like, Flash-heavy site called MyHeavy.com. I'm not sure if the content is really live or if its just a demo. Its somewhat of a Flash Desktop in the context of a MySpace community. The UI renders painfully slow and I guess you could do much of the (mostly useless) UI widgets with AJAX.
One cool aspect of the experience was the Playlist tool. This allows users to assemble a playlist of their favorite music... many sites have something like this.
Here's the interesting part... you launch a person's playlist and it loads a Flash music player in a pop up with advertising in the form of a branded animation synched with beat-tracking to match the music. In this screenshot you see an animation of a DJ spinning records branded by Honda. You also see banner ads displaying Honda's brand. The music playing is A Tribe Called Quest, and the playlist was created by "Ghostfucker." The animation is simply the hand spinning the record, cutting back and forth somewhat synched to the rhythm. There are lighting effects synched to the music too, though at the moment of this image capture it was a little dark.
Just interesting to see how people are beginning to monetize playlist creation and audiovisualizers.
Posted by jkinberg at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2006
Google Video... just when you thought it was safe
Just when I thought the script I had written was obsolete and Google was actually providing downloadable files, I learn from the astute comments here that the Google Video downloads do not actually download a file that will play in common media players, but instead a .gvp file that only plays in some kind of Google Video Player. Not only that, but the file streams the video from the web so that it doesn't play if you are attempting to view offline.
So, by popular demand I went ahead and updated the previous Google Video Getter greasemoney script. It now fixes the display error caused by Google's slight redesign of the Google Video inerface. See the previous post for installation instructions. The image below shows what this script does... it displays a link to download the Flash Video file form Google Video. You will need to rename the file with a .flv extension and view in a Flash Video compatible player.
Posted by jkinberg at 12:40 AM | Comments (1)
January 10, 2006
Google Video... now with Downloads
A while back I wrote a Greasemonkey script to add a download link for the videos hosted at Google Video and posted it here on my blog. Recently its started to pick up a lot of attention, mostly because it was on the front of Digg.com for a day or so. Since then, Google Video has added a few new features:
1. Google Video has added some navigation at the top right of the screen that covers up the download link created by the greasemonkey script. Its easy to change in the script since its only about 10 lines of code. Just change the inline CSS and place the box somewhere else on the screen.
2. The greasemonkey script is now irrelevant anyway because Google Video now indludes download links for all free videos. There are also downloads in multiple formats specific to the video iPod and Sony PSP. Here's a screenshot:
3. Google Video now offers some downloads for purchase, including NBA games, old TV shows, and music videos.
This will be interesting to see how it grows over time. Glad to see that they are improving their service.
Posted by jkinberg at 3:59 PM | Comments (8)