vTap, one of my personal favorites for video search, has a new feature that I think video junkies will find immensely useful. It's a new recommendation service that will pull in videos related to whatever keywords you give it, and maintain them in a simple feed that's updated constantly. As a user you can keep tabs on new videos that pop-up on the feed either through vTap's site, on your mobile phone, or social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.
Search terms can now be added to your feed as keywords. You'll get matching items added to your feed as they are published.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Best of all is that adding keywords to your feed is natural. Since the service revolves around search, you can simply add the query or any of the results to your feed list with one click. It also pulls in videos from people you might be tracking on user generated video networks such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Veoh.
The easiest way to build a feed very quickly is the Facebook application. There's absolutely zero work required since all the data of what you're into is already in your profile. It grabs books, movies, TV shows, and music and turn them into video keywords that can be toggled on and off. If your friends have the application installed they'll be able to see and adopt your interests as well, making the experience a little more viral.
The MySpace implementation is a little more flashy, and shows what your friends are into by approaching each of their related video tastes like a filmstrip that you can browse in a two-paned viewer. The application uses the OpenSocial architecture as well, meaning that eventually you'll get the added benefit of data portability from your friends on other services.
Another service that's been experimenting with video feed recommendations is Meefedia, which Harrison checked out earlier this month. There's also FaveBot (review), which tacks on blog posts, podcasts, music files, and all sorts of other Web media. Of course the difficulty in any of these is finding the time and a good place to absorb and manage the content, which is what I think vTap has done well with its two prong attack of desktop and mobile clients.
Ben Wilson over at iPhone Atlas (one of our CNET sister sites) wrote a post earlier today about how Veveo's vTap service for the iPhone is "possibly the best iPhone Web app yet," citing its on the fly-encoding and killer UI as worthy reasons to use it over the iPhone's built-in YouTube application. The service searches videos from all over the Net and lets users watch them on the iPhone after converting them to an acceptable format on their own servers.
We checked out the Windows Mobile version of the app back in August, and since then the iPhone version seems to have been tightened up a bit. Loading videos is still unbearably slow over EDGE (which isn't vTap's problem), but if you're on a fast connection over Wi-Fi, it's really one of the best ways to view videos from all over the internet. Besides YouTube, you're getting videos from Google and MSN Video, Vimeo, the Weather Channel, Dailymotion, and a dozen of other sources.
There are two things that I think make the app really fantastic for iPhone owners. The first is that it will serve us abstracts from RSS feeds while you're waiting for a video to finish re-encoding. You can actually set up which feeds you want to see, including Newsvine, Yahoo Finance, Google News, or the latest publicly shared photos from Flickr. Clicking any of these feeds will take you right to the story or photo link while the video continues to encode. The second best part is that you can choose only to listen to the audio from a video clip, which means you can enjoy long, dialogue-heavy clips with your phone's screen off and in your pocket--which is super handy for enjoying shared lecture videos.
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