Sunday, December 16, 2007

Coding is more enjoyable with friends

While I am not activity looking, I am open to inviting developers to work on myVidster. It gets lonely coding alone ;). myVidster is coded in php and mysql with a splash of ajaxs. I am very passionate about this project and I feel that myvidster is a fun and useful project. We all had that funny/interesting video that we wanted to share with our friends, but sending an email/IM with a youtube link is so web 1.0. myVidster is my vision of simplifying the collection and presentation of ones personal videos or those of interests.

If interested contact me here.

Importing DP Posts

Before I created this blog, I was documenting my progress with myVidster on a few discussion treads on the Digital Point forum. I am going to move these posts to this blog in an attempt to better track the development progress of myVidster.

The next few post will just be cut and paste from the forum, so expect to see new posts appear to be within minutes of each other.

Updates (Dec 3rd 2007)

Post imported from DP

Updates
I added a new logo (old one needed more color).
Made the homepage more attractive (more color and added more links to click on).
Videos can be downloaded and converted to any format (integrated media-convert.com). Note this does not work for google video, but it does for all other flash videos like youtube, myspace, etc.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

The ethics of faking traffic and stats

After watching an interview of Mike Arrington (TechCrunch), it got me thinking. Arrington made comments about the number of new startups that attempt to pitch their new web2 thingy that is going to revolutize the world (MizPee for example) in an attempt to get free publicity on his blog. With the number of solitations being around 30 a day, the odds for the average joe to get exposure is little to none.

You get the feeling that the rich get richer (if you have a couple of million of VC funding TC will notice) and the poor is shit out of luck (self funded and who are you?).

This blog is not about me bashing Arrington, but I wanted to set the stage for what I am about to say. The internet is now about big things. Big VC money, traffic, membership and buyouts. So weather you are a heavy funded startup or you run your server in your mom's basement it is all about big numbers.

I have spent a lot of time investigating my competition who cliam high traffic and can be 'validated' with sites like Compete and Alexa. After spending time on these 'high traffic' sites my gut is telling me that something is wrong. Most of us IT pros can navigatate around any site, assess the value of the content, overall concept and come to a conclusion on weather or not the site could be a winner. When I see a new startup advertise 100K site visits a day or their millionth register user, I would expect this site show a decent level of user activity and not a look as if it was a barren wasteland. I do not see any activtiy in the comments and the posting of new content is done by the top 10 users (wow joesmith has posted 4,000 stories/pictures/videos and has only been a member for 6 months). So what are the other 99,990 users doing?

I have friend who also has a startup. He overexagrats his membership by a factor of 10x and invests in fake traffic services to get on Alexa's top 10K. His justified his actions by stated that everyone is doing it, no one gets caught and it is a easy way to get free blog publicity (remember TechCrunch loves big numbers). He also scored an advertising contact. So is the moral of this story is that being unethical pays? While the idea was extremly tempting I decided to take the 'long route' in hops of producing a site that provides quailty over qaunity will succeed in the long run.

TechCrunch, GigaOM, Mashable all love big numbers and without their knowing they are enocouarging the inflation of web statics. Just like the U.S. dollor, stats are losing their value day by day.

Marques Gunter (owner of a self funded startup myVidster)

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Updates (Sep 5th 2007)

Post imported from DP

A Update for those who care
Related Stories from Digg.com (experimental) for video

I am not too sure if I am love or hate this feature. I am a big fan of digg and I wanted diggs stories that relate to the video to be display. This could slow the site down if Digg is having scaling issues or could confuse the non-techy user. I could leave it as an option that the user will have to turn on instead of having it by default. Sorry if I am not making any sense it is 8am and I need my coffee.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Updates (Aug 27, 2007)

Post imported from DP

UPDATE (for those who care)
Added some color, login/register box, tag cloud and active galleries on the homepage.
Tag clouds for gallery and channels
Users can now see tags base on Gallery, Channel or the entire network.

Monday, August 6, 2007

myVidster Goes Public!

Post imported from DP

For the last six months I have been working on a personal project during my free time. I wanted a video bookmarking system that was simple to use, provide organization controls (sort, edit, categorize, move, etc) and could also be used as a video gallery to present my videos to a larger audience.

So after hundreds of hours of coding I created myVidster.

What makes myVidster special?
Provides a bookmarklet to add video clips from any video host, site or blog.
FLV download from the bookmarklet and gallery
Full support for Flash/Quicktime/Windows Media/DivX
Dynamic thumbnail creation for any video site (you can select from 3 thumbnails).
Presentation layer using a gallery/channel interface.
Provides relations with other users (show you other users who are collecting the same videos)
mySpace style urls (www.myvidster.com/marques)
Full text search engine (the real thing!!!) for your personal collection and for the myVidster network.

TODO:
I am still working on the subscription function to allow users to subscribe to channels and galleries and I will be merging search results very soon.

myVidster is open to the public, right now I have been very busy with my day job (it pays my bills) and have not been marketing it, but when I free up some time I will start making some noise

Here are few galleries that myself and my friends have created.

www.myvidster.com/marques
www.myvidster.com/salsaindy
www.myvidster.com/salsa

if you have not guess it, we are all salsa dancers .