GlitchNYC

At about midnight last night, I realized that it was now April Fools and that the internet pranks were about to start rolling in. Right then, Gmail started boasting it’s new “Custom Time” feature, a.viary rolled out their auto-aging tool “Dodo”, and blip.tv added a new “rickroll” advertisting format to go with pre-roll and post-roll.

I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to want a way to collect the gags I’d found and that others would find ones I hadn’t seen yet, so I asked Nate to whip up a quick BricaBox for us. A BricaBox is like a really advanced plug-and-play website. Within 5 minutes, Nate had the site ready, including the ability for anyone to add a listing, vote on them, and add their comments and more info. The best listings will rise to the top, Digg style. The only way he could have whipped up something this functional that fast is with BricaBox, and that’s what makes it so powerful.

We’ve done other quickie BricaBoxes, like the ResistorSource, which lists great food and drink venues near NYCResistor (also handy for BarCampNYC and PodCampNYC which happen nearby as well). When you’re working with locations you can just add the google maps module, and all the places will appear on the map automatically. It’s pretty freaking cool.

As BricaBox grows, Nate and his team will be making more modules that let you do even more with BricaBoxes at lightning speed. I’m really looking forward to seeing where the next few months take them as they focus on UI and functionality and a few big projects give them the opportunity to develop new modules.

For now, take a look at the April Fools Joke Sites BricaBox and add any gags you’ve discovered!

Is it just me, or is there an abnormally large number of great folks in the new web communities that have sprung up in the past few years? Maybe it’s the fact that most of the people I’m working with lately are into the idea of creating or participating in something great, rather than making a boatload of money, but I’ve met more than my fair share of kick-ass people this year.

That said, even among these great people, it’s not often you meet someone who is genuinely cool and also willing to give you their time and enthusiasm with no thoughts of what they’ll get in return.

I’ve been developing a Wordpress widget for Clipmarks that allows you to add clips to the side of your blog. It’s only my second wordpress plugin, so I figured it would be a bit rough around the edges and would benefit from some true beta testing. We invited the incredibly awesome Torley to be our first beta tester Thursday night, and not only did he test it out and give us great feedback, but he’s also blogged about the tool and has done the legwork of installing an updated version of the beta just a day later!

I’ve spent the past year getting involved in communities and meeting amazing people, but it still always astounds me when people are this cool. It makes me really excited for the things that we’re capable of building if we continue to work together!

Long blog-post short: Thanks Torley!

PS - I’d love to test this widget out on a bunch of blogs before we go live with it, and could really use the help, if you’ve got a wordpress blog. Just drop me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch!

Last night I attended the 2nd Video 2.0 Meetup here in NYC. The audience was a mix of startup companies in online video and content producers. Among the notables that I recognized in the audience were Andrew and Joanne from RocketBoom and some of the folks from Blip.tv .

The event is held in a screening room for the Tribeca film festival where greats like Scorsese routinely hold private screenings (there were even rumors of Scorsese himself breezing in and out of the projection room, but that may have been a joke.)

I took some pretty decent notes on each of the presenters, and surprisingly, each of these companies had something new and different to bring to the table. In my next few posts, I’ll summarize each of the services and then talk a bit about why I found them interesting.

Motionbox

Motionbox opened the night, and were quick to differentiate themselves from other video hosting sites by working to solve the “unproduced content problem.” With photos on flickr, you can easily scan through thumbnails of your friend’s vacation, and zoom in on the few great pictures, but with video, you’re stuck watching the whole thing.

Motionbox allows you to highlight sections of videos, and even creates permalinks to those selected clips. It’s quite cool, and they hinted that “more cool stuff was coming in the fall.

They’re already partnered with NBC5 in Chicago, and if you go to nbc5.com you can see where “viewers” are submitting content, and that can be integrated into the broadcast news.

Once questions began, we got the nitty-gritty on their back end. Their service is programmed in ruby on rails, and their custom player is written in FLEX on top of Flash 9. They’ve got about 20 folks on their team and have outside investors, although they didn’t specify who or how much. I believe they mentioned that they were hiring, but I could be mistaken. It can’t hurt to shoot them a resume if you’re interested.

As far as monetization, they’re planning a pro-product as well as ads, and you know that deals like the NBC5 partnership can’t hurt.

My opinion? I was just about to tune out and pass motionbox off as a yaytc (Yet Another Youtube Clone… it sounds like “Yahtzee!” when you say it out loud) when I heard them mention “something cool coming in the fall” a second time while talking about their ability to highlight clips. They started to taking about permissions that you can grant to your file, such as giving different people the permission to highlight and link to clips, or mix and mash it up with others.

Aha! Mix and mash?! Now this is starting to sound cool, and you can understand why they’re hesitant to announce this formally until they’ve got it ready. This is of course just my speculation, but how awesome would it be if I could go on Motionbox and create my own “America’s funniest home videos”, complete with music track? Or create a full on music video using footage other people have uploaded? My ears certainly perked up at the end there, and if they’ve really got this up their sleeves, I don’t think I’ll be the only one excited about it.

There were 4 more presenters, and there’s four more pieces to this round up coming, just as fast as I can type them! Stay tuned!