Vodpod, A Video Social Networking Community

Vodpod is a company that has gained a little bit of traction these past several months through the concept of video social networking. The basic idea is for users to create accounts (‘pods’) and share videos through them. The three step process to becoming active on the website is:
1.) start a pod (profile)
2.) share or upload videos and
3.) invite people to your ‘pod’ to check out your videos.

I created an account to explore the service a little bit more in depth. After creating an account, Vodpod redirected me to the Dashboard:

There are several ways to associate videos with your pod. You can use the built-in metasearch or you could just provide a direct link from YouTube, MySpace Video, Google Video, and Metacafe. You could also provide a direct FTP location for your video, upload videos from your hard drive, add videos from other vodpod ‘pods,’ or add videos that you have bookmarked on Vodpod.

Other features that revolve around your pod also includes commenting, filtering out the most recent videos and top rated videos or to display all the videos on your pod. There is also RSS available for your pod and personalized .vodpod.com URLs that you can give register for also. There are widgets (Blog badges) that you can embed on your own personal websites. There’s a sample widget on NewTeeVee.com, a website that is part of the GigaOM network.

In my opinion and from a business standpoint, the actual social networking aspect of the website could use a little bit of brushing up. I say this because I see a lot of generic features on the website that I have seen with other sites. For example, Most Recent Viewed, Top Rated, and All Videos is a common feature used on YouTube. However, I think pretty highly of the widget.

VodPod was created by Remixation, Inc., a San Francisco based indepedent company formed in Spring 2006. Development of VodPod began on June 1, 2006 by Mark Hall, Spencer Miles, and Scott Persinger. Toni Schneider, the CEO of WordPress is also an advisor of Vodpod along with Philip Rosedale, CEO of LindenLabs.

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