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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