uShow Brings Us Closer to a Video Conversation
uShow today launched a site that brings together discussions about video from around the web. I’m not entirely convinced that the year-old startup has found a way to make itself essential, but it’s come up with some pretty neat tricks to help make video conversation more natural.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based uShow has built a player that intakes YouTube videos and overlays them with tags to identify people and comments, similar to Facebook and Flickr, respectively. The tags and comments are time-stamped and automatically shared. So if I were to watch a video on uShow and click on a place that my friend appeared and connect to her Twitter account, uShow would immediately send my action out as a tweet that mentioned her and linked to the video, with a time stamp indicating exactly when I tagged it.
uShow streams videos within its own player interface, and the company founders claim that since they don’t rehost the video or destroy YouTube’s watermark, they don’t break the site’s terms of service. Further, uShow does everything without any additional plug-in to download.
The site itself does not have an account system, which is pretty daring but probably a very good move. Users are invited to log in through their existing Twitter or Facebook accounts, and thus bring along their networks of existing contacts and status updates. When you log into uShow the front page is a video stream that scrapes your Twitter friends’ accounts in real time for YouTube links and embeds.
Users can also upload videos directly to the site from their own webcam, mobile or hard drive — functionality similar to other Twitter video services like 12seconds.tv and its many competitors.
uShow, which has five employees, is angel-backed and hopes to gain enough traction to raise venture funding this fall.
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Thank You for the great post. I really love to read interesting articles such as yours.
BEWARE OF USHOW.COM
THE “OWNER” of this site is named Joe Shapiro. He has stolen the ideas, code and time of 7 other developers and has managed to release a youtube/twitter/facebook clone.
He is in the process of being sued. Just today, he had facebook disable an account of the guy who spent over 100 hours working on ushow.com. The logo, the video commenting, and pretty much everything else you see on ushow.com was HIS WORK!!!
Do not give Joe Shapiro any information. he is shady, and is costing Amir Meshkin a lot of time and money. His facebook apps are now disabled, and Joe Shapiro has been bragging and laughing about how he has ruined my friend’s life!!!!
Thisi s not a joke> The owner of ushow.com joe shapiro is the shadiest person I have ever come accross.
You have been warned!
Your post about youShow and Joe Sapiro is full of misleading and defaming statements that are not true. “Your friend” has obviously set you up to do this and you fell for it hook line and sinker. Didn’t you ask yourself why “your friend” didn’t do this post himself? Perhaps because he signed a settlement agreement that prevents it? You’re a fool and now that you’ve advertised it all over the web, you’ve become “web idiot”. I’ve known Joe Shapiro personally for years and he’s none of the things you describe in your post. I hope Joe sues you for slander. The truth is “you friend” failed to fulfill his commitments which makes him a loser just like you. You and “your friend” deserve each other. Wise up and get a life. Do something positive instead of trying to wrongfully damage other people.