If you've ever wanted to run a bunch of video widgets on your desktop, there's a new service for you called uvLayer. It's a tiny Adobe AIR application that lets you search, view, and organize Web video clips on your desktop and share them with others. The videos come courtesy of YouTube and Truveo--the AOL-owned video search tool.
What sets uvLayer appart from basic Web video browsing are its sharing features which are robust. The application lets you cobble together a instant-messanger-like friends list and drag and drop any video you think they would enjoy. If they're using the application, your shared video will simply show up on their desktop like a new e-mail would in your in-box. Likewise, you can simply hop over to see what they're watching if they're online.
For bookmarking addicts, uvLayer also lets you share entire sets full of Web videos via URL. If your recipient has the application installed, their screen will simply fill up with your video picks, complete with your original groupings. You can then syndicate these Webtops to both your uvLayer buddies, and your Facebook friends who will be able to view it right in the Facebook application.
The entire uvLayer experience is very reminiscent of OS X's Dashboard for widgets, as you can flip each item around and get access to some of the metadata like the rating and any user comments. It's very flashy. In fact, if you're running the latest version of OS X, then uvLayer might not be that interesting considering you can rip out nearly any Web video and put it on your Dashboard using Safari's Web clips feature.
I'm not sold on the value of watching videos in a virtual desktop environment. While convenient, I think there's a ton of added value to the community of users where the video's hosted. Admittedly when a video hits the front page of Digg or Fark, the user comments from those sites are usually much more entertaining, but the same can't be said when you're passing it along to a just handful of people.
I've embedded a live version of uvLayer after the break (taken from Ryan Stewart's first look over at his blog on ZDNet). Be sure to check out its stacking feature, which lets you group together several videos at once by drawing a box around them with your mouse.
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I'm a big fan of simple search tools, and one of the areas that's been booming lately is video search. There are dozens of popular services for hosting video, but few for crawling all of them at once. Video search service Truveo, which was quickly gobbled up by AOL after launching in late 2005, has been fairly quiet for the last year or so. Their technology powers video search for AOL, Windows Live Search, Metacrawler, and CNET's own Search.com tool, along with many other services you're likely to recognize. Today they're re-launching Truveo.com, in hopes to compete with Google, Yahoo, and Blinkx's video search tools.
Videos on Truveo play nice and big. If you run across paid, or offsite content, it will shoot you off to an outside page.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Truveo's claim to fame is that they crawl and index both user-generated video sites, along with ones that put out professional media content like NBC and CBS. For example, searching for an episode of The Office will pull up results from YouTube and Google video (what hasn't been taken down at least), along with links to "official" video hosted on NBC's various video pages, and links to various episodes for purchase at online stores like iTunes. It will also list videos from other video services like BBC News, Blip.tv, and Metacafe. The key emphasis, however, isn't on user generated content, as much as professionally produced video content.
A good number of the videos indexed through Truveo will play right in the engine, except for ones that have rights usage restrictions. A big change old Truveo users will notice with the re-launch is that videos play much larger than they used to--many now appear twice as big. There's also an increased emphasis on sharing, and community features--including a way to build your own widget containing a hit list of clips you've bookmarked.
A great use for services like this is for finding recent video clips from news stations. Google's video search is great for finding the most popular content on YouTube and Google Video, but head-to-head, Truveo did a much better job at finding recent clips, and avoiding the "backyard" handicam videos you tend to run into. Blinkx on the other hand was just as capable at finding similar content, although I prefer Truveo's static result pages to Blinkx's visual overload of moving thumbnails and auto-playing videos.
I've embedded an example of the video playlist widget after the jump. There are also several more screenshots. To see them, click the "read more" link below.
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