I signed up for the P2P video sharing site Grouper clear back in November 2004 (my Grouper profile shows me as “old school level 5″ whatever that means). Didn’t write anything about Grouper at the time as it was one of those demos where I looked at it, downloaded, installed and then decided it wasn’t something I’d use or thought many others would use very often.

With the explosion of video sites a la YouTube, it’s forcing me to reevaluate the whole “what others would use very often” scene. Every week I see, use and try several new sites/services/programs and since there is limited time for me to write about them I try and choose the ones where I see some possible real world application. I will mention the ones I don’t review here (or elsewhere) sometimes in the Hmm Quickies.

So why bother with Grouper now, some 1 1/2 years later?
While I still don’t see Grouper being in the same league as YouTube, there is more here to make their site and service attractive:

1. Grouper has added some new features which make it less dependent on downloading and using their Windows only (.NET) P2P client for sharing the videos. In fact, I didn’t install the new version of Grouper for writing or demoing anything in this post.
2. They added post to blog functions, but only for MySpace, Friendster, Blogger and Wordpress.com. I’d like to see all video sharing sites having post to blog functionality. And these post to blog functions should cover the half dozen or so primary blogging platforms (hosted and non-hosted). In their official grouper blog, the headline — “A new easy way to post video to your Wordpress blogs” — is a bit deceptive. It’s not post to any Wordpress blog, it’s post to any wordpress.com blog. Big difference and while I’m sure it’s not intentional, they might want to add on the .com part. Too bad it doesn’t allow post to any Wordpress-powered blog (does it?) or we could integrate here once in awhile. Maybe that function is/will be coming? It should be.

Video shoutouts
To illustrate just how much Grouper has gotten away from being a Windows-only/primarily gig to being open to multiple OS, they’ve added a feature called Video Shoutouts which can be recorded right in the browser using Flash 8. To demo I created my first Grouper video shoutout using an iSight camera on a Mac inside Firefox (shown at top of this post).

If I embedded the video above correctly it should not autoplay. Unfortunately, when I posted this a little bit ago to my test wordpress.com blog it does start autoplaying on page visits and I didn’t see any configuration to turn that off (?). Make this requested change #2 please, Grouper. Netizens do not like unexpected autoplay.

But will people actually use audio/video for comments?
I’ve always liked the concept of users being able to leave comments in audio/video. For one, there’s no denying who left the comment when you have a face and voice to go along with the name. Text comments when they can be anonymously left leave you wondering sometimes. Also, they are more personal I think simply by the nature of combinging audio/video.

Clear back in 2002 I created a messageboard system where a targeted group of webmasters could record and leave audio messages. Many people commented how cool it was and were excited by the technology and possibilities but very few actually used the service and the experiment ultimately died. I remember hearing all sorts of excuses like “I don’t have a microphone” and “people won’t like my voice.”

It is this negative experience that leaves me skeptical. Especially because these people weren’t just unconnected net newbies, these were webmasters. People who you would expect to have above average knowledge of the web. If one can’t get this group actually using audio comments, I’m not sure about audio and video comments with the masses four years plus later.

Video is definitely on the rise, but I wonder how much of the interest in video is an interest in pirated content and not homebrew and/or video blogging? The video bloggers talk like the next greatest thing on the web is going to be video blogging.

With this in mind I didn’t see many — actually I didn’t see any — video comments being left on the Grouper.com site (I’m sure there are some), even though the process of leaving them doesn’t require any downloads or special software (beyond Flash which is installed on the majority of computers out there). Yes, you do need a webcam and microphone and do need to authorize the Flash object to connect to your webcam and microphone to record the actual video comment. Recording is as basic as pressing a button to start recording, watching the 3..2..1 and then saying what you have to say, and then pressing stop when you are done.

8 days of TV fasting
As I write this our family has now been without television for 8 days. If you’d like to guess how many days we’re going to make it without TV, enter your guess in days as a comment here. If we get at least 10 guesses (one per person please) before we give in to the TV demons, then we plan to make an official Hmm contest out of it and kick in at least one prize.

Is it video week yet?
Wow, this week I’ve used a webcam a couple different ways [see using webcam as inventory bar code scanning tool]. Maybe I am being bitten by the video/webcam bug after all?

Can you think of some other useful ways to use a webcam? Feel free to share your webcam ideas below. How much do you use your webcam? Do you have one? Why? Why/not?

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