Tumri

It's been a long time since the last post, thanks to the new job I just took up with a company called Tumri. Internet advertising has changed so much since the banner ad days and Tumri is in the thick of it.

Their targeted, dynamic ad widget caught my attention initially, enough to go interview with and join them! The store you see on the right is a sample store showing MP3 players.

It took me about 3 mins to create the store and copy/paste it here, check it out!

ImageMagick, PNG and You...

I learned that PNG files can get bloated pretty quickly while creating them using the ImageMagick libraries.

The best way to reduce the size is to by reducing the depth of the images from the default 16 pixel to 8 pixels. This may degrade the quality of the images, especially photos but this suited my needs perfectly well.

I saw 60% plus reduction in file size, simply amazing!

More feedback...

Very insightful feedback from one of Cliplet's new users, something I would never have thought about. He said that some of the Myspace users understand videos and bookmarking but not really all that savvy about creating a collection of video bookmarks.

This got me thinking about how I can simplify creating, adding to and embedding a cliplet on Myspace. The easiest way seems to auto"magically" import a Myspace member's videos or favorites into a cliplet.

Wish Myspace published APIs, oh well.

New features

Cliplets now includes some cool new features. Anyone creating a cliplet can now mark it private so only those invited to view it can see the cliplet.

Also, a member can populate a cliplet with their favorites from YouTube by simply providing their YouTube username when they create the cliplet.

Sharing a cliplet just got better -- visitors have 3 types of embedding to choose from. You can embed the Javascript if you want the full UI, copy/paste the HTML for just the thumbnails or just the plain vanilla link to the cliplet.

Finally, cliplets can be added to NetVibes and Pageflakes as add-ons. Just copy paste the URLs to the Mini API Module on NetVibes or as a feed on Pageflakes and you are ready to go!

NetVibes and Pageflakes

Cliplets could be a great way for members of NetVibes or PagesFlakes to showcase their collection of vides on their home page collection.

Both NetVibes and Pageflakes provide simple, XHTML-based specifications for creating and publishing add-on modules to a collection.

The problem is, the XHTML standard used by them is inconsistent with each other and with the XHTML 1.0 standard itself! Just because you created a super-strict XHTML page validated by the validator maintained by W3.org, you are not guaranteed it will work on either of these sites.

Clearly this is a work in progress!

I had an interesting chat with two kids who are into social networking , especially from a user perspective. They had some great feedback on Cliplets.

Suggestions ranged from being able to create private collections, invite friends, delete a video from the collection, etc. all the way to blocking collections based on appropriateness.

I was surprised to hear that teenagers actually cared about protecting younger children from inappropriate content. It was quite refreshing to see that level of sophistication among someone so young.

Here is a sample cliplet for those who are curious, the first one creating during this chat.

Hello World!

Hello world! After much skepticism, I chose to finally enter the world of blogs. There are two motivations -- one personal and the other professional.

The personal motivation is to put the pen to the paper (or the keypad in this case) about my ideas on the way the whole social computing is evolving. This includes user-generated content, videos and beyond.

The professional motivation is my current undertaking to simplify how people collect, view and share their favorite videos from various sources. Called a "cliplet", I hope to give users a way to easily organize, view and share videos on MySpace, Bebo or similar sites.

Curious? Check out Cliplets.com.

More on this in the next issue ;-).