100% Customizable Embedded Video Widgets Available On 20 Feb 2009

on Friday, 20 Feb, we’ll be releasing another game changing piece of web 2.0 online video functionality – completely customizable video widgets that can be embedded into your blog or website.  We’ve been collecting feedback from a series of well known bloggers and the feedback has been remarkably positive.  You can select all of the colors associated with widgets hosted by our system – from the background colors to the text colors to the image border colors and even the shape of the title bar (square or rounded corners).  I have to say that it drop dead simple and remarkable in terms of the possible combinations.

You can even upload a logo and select where you’d like to have the logo displayed within the widget.

We’ve been developing custom widgets to Premium and corporate level customers for some time now. However, the design process was completely manual.  We’ve finally automated the process so that even TRIAL level members will be able to see the direct benefits of  designing and using their own embeddable widgets before they choose a premium or corporate membership.

Corporate members will be to design a number of custom branded widgets that can be made available to members of their corporate umbrella.

As always, once you’ve designed a custom branded widget, it automatically becomes the default widget whenever you upload a new video. No further configuration or manual selection is required – it just happens!

Our developer partners will find the APIs required to design widgets  programatically in the beta API toolset starting next week.

Widget Failure Is Not An Option

The making of a widget can be a complicated process. The more configurable the widget is, the more points of possible failure it has. We haven’t served you as well as we might have liked in this regard. In the initial version of our platform, we didn’t have an acceptable level of proactive visibility to quickly identify failed widgets or the data right at our fingertips to quickly fix them.  This meant that the same error might continue for hours or days until noticed – until now.

You have been clear in communicating to us that we need to have a robust system. We all know that errors can occur and in response have added an internal system of error identification and notification into our video and document widget functionality. In the week that it has been live, it has been so successful in helping us identify even the tiniest of errors that dont impact the customer that we plan on rolling this same error handling approach broadly across our platform (including the multimedia developer API). So now, when the inadvertent widget error occurs, not only does our support staff and dev team get notified immediately upon a widget error, but I also get notified…for any error….no matter how trivial.  A database entry is also made for tracking purposes by the platform support team.

Errors do happen at times…but, as you say, they should be occasional, one time issues. As such, our teams will be measured on their ability to respond quickly and and ensure that the same error doesn’t again occur. If you aren’t satisfied, just tell me and we’ll make it right.

here is a real life example involving live functionality from a real customer. We rolled the error reporting system out a week ago and we just had our first notification this morning involving a live video interview widget on RAMB’s Broker Profitability page.  The widget had failed, the error message was sent to our support team with specific detail to identify the problem, and the widget was fixed within minutes. You’ll see that all of the RAMB widgets display properly again.

From here on, widget failure is not an option…

Data and More Data: How People Are Actually Finding Real Estate Content

We love data.  What becoming more interesting to us these days is how people are actually finding content posted anywhere on our system. We’ve been collecting data about real estate video views, how people behave on our site while watching real estate videos, and other stuff but we’ve had a big hole in our stats.  We know how we’d prefer that people find us (a majority of SEO work seems predicated of we prefer that people  find)…but what we dont yet have a good grasp of how visitors are actually finding content broadly across our own and partner sites.  We need a format that makes the initial process easier/faster/more efficient directly from the search engine result.

Better way to put it: we have certain sites that use specific search data on an individual video or page view basis but dont have an easy way to aggregate that data across all of our supported sites to turn that data into meaningful information. We made some system tweaks over the weekend and can already see that we are getting the results that we want in some areas but need work in a lot of other areas.

The result will hopefully be better visibility and actionable information generated around how people actually find platform content.  Stay tuned…

FSBL API: Get A List Of Files From A Folder In Your Social Network Workspace

Update: After posting this blog article, we’ve since consolidated all of our API overviews in a single location on the ForSaleByLocals commercial site. You can find the API overview to get a list of files from a folder. there.

How To Use The FSBL Video Conversion API

This article is fairly technical and describes how to use the first version of the FSBL Video Conversion API and the accompanying FSBL Video Conversion Followup API. There is no interface when using the video conversion API – if you are looking for an online video conversion tool that provides a customizable interface, try our Video Conversion Widget .

The Conversion API allows you to automate video conversions from any FTP location, convert the video content from a preconfigured default set of output formats or override that default for a custom conversion, and then send all of the converted video files to another FTP location. This provides web developers or website/blog owners a number of self hosting video conversion options and online business scenarios other than Youtube or Wellcomemat.

Your time is important. One thing that we have done to improve the speed of processing is to make the file conversion processing completely distributable across our entire cluster of conversion servers so large video files process in parallel. Files will be sent to any available open server for processing and yet the system will still know the status of your overall conversion request no matter how users are also processing files at the same time, how many files there are to be converted, or the number of conversions for each file. Any files that remain in the queue will be sent immediately to the next open server. The only exception is that paid users of any level will have first priority over users at the free level.

Update: After posting this article, we’ve since moved all of our API descriptions to a special area of the ForSaleByLocals site. You can more easily find the API overview to convert video to your own FTP site there.

Please email or call us with any questions or issues.

First Version Of Our Multimedia Social Network API To Release This Week

We’ll have the first customer ready application programming interfaces (or APIs) for our social network later this week just in time for our new release. If you have used the social network at http://social.vidlisting.com, you know that you can do things like organize content into folders, or give permissions to other users/cliques for specific content or groups of content.

This means that you’ll be able to either build rich multimedia applications or website functionality using the social network as your content management tool.  To be clear, the API set will only be available to Corporate level members but will provide a growing set of features that we hope will be seen as a value add. We’ll keep it really simple at first – just two simple but useful interfaces.

Manage Content Hierachically – Folders are a collection of items organized into personalized hierarchical groupings. Therefore, the first API will represent the simple sub-collections within these groupings. 

In simple terms, the API will provide a feed of all content within any named folder in your workspace regardless of the source or type of that content (Vidlisting video, Real Estate Shows, Youtube Video, PDF, Office document, or link). This means that you or your web developer can make any of this type of content appear or disappear on your website by simply using the social network to drag and drop the content out of a social network folder.  It’s about the easiest way that we can think of for a non-technical person to manage content on their website.

You’ll also be able to choose if everyone with whom you have shared a virtual folder will also get an API key regardless of their member level. Even free members therefore will be able to put your content on their websites if you allow them to.

Convert Video Content: For me, this is the really exciting of the two APIs that we are releasing. Corporate members will be able to place video content on any internet accessible server to which they have authorized access and via the API be able to convert it into a variety of formats simultaneously using the ForSaleByLocals conversion cluster, and then place the converted content on the same server or any other internet accessible server to which they have authorized access. 

In short, you can move a video file into a directory on one of your own servers and then send a simple API command to one of our servers to process the file into multiple file formats, and finally send the converted file(s) back to that server or any other server (production server, file server, customer server, etc.)

In short, by making use of this second API, the Corporate level user will be able to outsource only the conversion capabilities of our conversion cluster and maintain 100% control of their own media within an entirely automated process. We think that this may well revolutionize how organizations view how they use and process video content by third party providers.

Opening The Kimono – We Have Some Widget Interface Work Left To Be Done

After spending some time building Vidlisting widgets myself and working with others making widgets today, here is my report card.

I think that we have come a long way on the individual widgets due to the recent focus on simplifying the interface for individual widgets. We found that people can quickly and easily build the individual widgets, change their design, retitle them, and add extra content. That said, we clearly need to invest more time in the horizontal and vertical bar-style widget creation interfaces. 

For example, it appears that we “lost” the ability to call previously made horizontal and vertical widgets in our interface redesign (you could do easily do that before the redesign). Also, the widget reporting and the shared media interfaces share a common usability issue so we’ll do a bit of work there as well.

Our plan is to get started on this work after we get the new functionality out the door later this week.

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Check out our Wilmington N.C. hyperlocal site

More Progress On Geolocation And Discoverability Capabilities

We continue to make progress on adding “unstructured data” such as craigslist real estate ads to our hyperlocal database. We now have over 25,000 links to craigslist real estate ads in our database in just over three days.

Examples: 

Miami Shores:  http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/M/english/United+States/FL/Miami+Shores

Marina Del Rey, CA http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/M/english/United+States/CA/Marina+Del+Rey

We’ll be adding to the simple geolocation capabilities in the next few days to provide a set of useful functionality to members of the Vidlisting real estate social network. Expect that functionality to be available on Friday of this week. Note that though we do mantain metadata, all links for such unstructured data go back to the provider – we just make the link more discoverable.

Experimenting With Hyperlocal Multimedia Concepts

In an effort to improve your ability to marketing ability to market your services and properties online, we’ve been doing some experimentation with concepts around hyperlocal information.

The driving question is how can we better integrate the set of tools that we have inside and outside the real estate social network (a relatively content agnostic multimedia platform, geolocation engine, SEO capaibilities, Dynamic RSS capabilities, and our social network) to help you gain new business in ways that other tools don’t.

One idea involves a return to our roots. ForSaleByLocals was originally intended to be a hyperlocal online sales platform for products and services. We especially wanted to be able to add structure to relatively unstructured data.  We define “relatively unstructured data” as being primarily free text with some textual clues as to location. Being able to automatically add such structure might be a potential way to overcome the “ghost towns” that many hyperlocal sites suffer from.  We’d also like to be sure that there is a hyperlocal feed that isnt just based on town name or zip code to help real estate bloggers find hyperlocal information that applies to them.

Also, part of our thinking is to combine all of the existing FSBL online capabilities into a multifaceted online platform that together go beyond the best advantages of each individual capability. We’ve started a demonstration of our thinking but it still needs some database performance optimization (translation: still slow). Below are some examples of what we are thinking:

http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/M/english/United+States/FL/Orlando

http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/M/english/United+States/VA/Charlottesville

The demonstration should work for most places in the United States.  Part of the demonstration is also looking for ways to test easy ways to access and format results. The link format is easy – URL/localdata/units of measurement (M Or K)/Language/Country/State/City (Note: Any spaces in country names or city names must be replaced with a “+” ).  We also can wrap geolocation data (read “add latitudes and longitudes”) around just about any sort of relatively unstructured external data online.  In this demonstration, we’ve wrapped it around Twitter posts, Youtube videos, and Craigslist ads.  The craigslist ads will be more complete over the next week. 

It isnt a perfect system but we could just as easily wrap it around blog posts within a blogging network or many other things.  This is the power of maintaining an internal capability to geocode lat and long data.

We’ve also applied it to most  of the 83 countries that we have in our Geo database, however, the URL format is different outside the US (we’ll add system wide town level search functionality in the next few days to make it easy to find any location)

If you are a member of our social network at http://social.vidlisting.com and have a public profile or shared media, this information will automatically be syndicated into a number of information distribution channels based on your location.

Let us know what you think.

Adding To Our Detailed Geolocation Database

We once again are focused on geolocation as a value-add to our video and social networking platforms. To give you an idea of the size of our data, France’s detailed town level geolocation took the entire working day to upload.

We currently have the following countries in our database and activated so that members, videos, and properties can be properly geolocated:

– Antigua and Barbuda
– Afghanistan
– Algeria
– Azerbaijan
– Albania
– Armenia
– Andorra
– Angola
– Argentina
– Australia
– Austria
– Bahrain
– Barbados
– Botswana
– Bermuda
– Belgium
– Belize
– Benin
– Belarus
– Soloman Islands
– Brazil
– Bahamas
– Bhutan
– Bulgaria
– Canada
– Chile
– Colombia
– Costa Rica
– Dominican Republic
– Ecuador
– El Salvador
– France
– Guatemala
– Japan
– Mexico
– Nicaragua
– New Zealand
– Paraguay
– Peru
– Panama
– Portugal
– UK
– USA (all 50 states + Puerto Rico)
– Uruguay

We’ll be adding an additional 20-30 countries over the next week or so. If you live in or have video content from any of the above countries, feel free to join any of our social networking platform partners such as http://catalog.vidlisting.com.

You’ll start to see some of the things that we are doing in the geolocation space over the week or so as well.