Magnify.net Different Than The Rest Of The Video Crowd
Magnify.net is a new video startup that is different from the rest of the crowd. Unlike YouTube and dozens of others, it isn’t focused on building a portal around user-uploaded videos. Instead, they are allowing website publishers to create their own video channels, and populate it with videos from other sites (like YouTube, Revver, Yahoo Videos, etc.) that allow embedding.
The result is a highly targeted niche video site that integrates very well into existing content websites. To see it in action, see this channel that they created for TechCrunch. There are a ton of publisher settings to allow customization, but the general idea is that we would add this to the site, and allow readers to add their own videos that they think will be interesting to this audience.
I’ve set the TechCrunch page up so that any reader can add video (direct from their computer, via a search feature or by pasting the actual video URL from a video site), and it will go into the collection after at least three others have reviewed it and it has at least a 5/10 rating on average (or an admin approves it). Videos that are approved can be rated, commented, tagged, shared, etc. Magnify.net also offers a RSS feed of all videos on the site, so readers can subscribe and stay up to speed on new videos.
Here’s an example of deeper integration with TechCrunch: One of our recent posts showed a Joost commercial. This video has also been added to the video site where others can interact with it as well.
This is actually perfect for the new CenterNetworks experiment where Allen Stern is calling for companies to send in demo videos of their products. They should set up a Magnify.net channel to organize these - the ratings feature is already built in. I’d like to get these videos onto TechCrunch as well, and readers can simply add them.
I’ve also been adding startup demos from ScobleShow. If startups have demo videos that they’d like to have this audience see, this would be a good place to add it.
There are other features as well that I haven’t mentioned (playlists, widgets, etc). The site is still very much in beta and needs some work on flow and the user interface (some features are hard to find). I’ve also noticed it runs very slow.
Magnify.net was founded by Steve Rosenbaum and Simon Cavalletto, and Scott Milener (previously Browster) is also involved. They have raised $1.2 million in seed financing from New York Angels and NextStage Capital. 3,500 channels have been created to date.
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More Traffic Transparency With whos.amung.us
Whos.Amung.us is a neat widget we came across tonight that some websites will want to add. It shows the number of concurrent users on a site at any given time.
Clicking on the widget also gives good stats on the recent URLs people visited as well as popular pages. Like Sitemeter (which we also have in the bottom right of the sidebar), it doesn’t do anything Google Analytics or other stats services don’t do - but it is an easy way to share more data about your site with your readers.
There is also a firefox extension that shows the total number of readers on your site at the bottom of the browser at all times.
We’ll keep it on TechCrunch until it manages to take the site down for the first time (every widget we add seems to do this eventually).
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