OpenNews/hackdays/storyandalgorithm/filptube
- Project name: Surfbored
- One-line description of project: We bring the TV surfing experience to social video.
- Your team: Please list project team members
Brian Boyer, Kara Oehler, Mark Boas, James Burns, Corey ford
- Project URL(s), if applicable: http://www.surfbored.tv/
- Hashtag, if #relevant:
- What are you building: What will the thing you are creating do, enable or solve, in 1 human-readable paragraph
FlipTube creates a lean-back video experience drawing off of videos curated via Twitter trending topics, users you follow, and Twitter list channels. One click and you are scanning through the video. Another click and you are watching what catches your eye.
- Who is it for: Describe your target user audience, e.g. "Everyone who uses the internet", "people in high risk environments", "People who still read 'Peanuts'"
People who come home at the end of the day, lean back, and want to watch a stream of videos based on a) what happened today? b) what are the most interesting videos my network is sharing today or c) what are interesting videos shared by a certain curated channel.
- Your goal for this weekend: where are you trying to get to by 2:45pm Sunday in terms of features, functionality or other creations
Make a minimum viable product that shows that you can pull together a video stream based on a Twitter filter, scans the videos with a lean back expereince, and find something interesting to watch.
- Your starting point: Are you writing from scratch? Designing a new concept? Modeling a data space? Extending a codebase or library? Adding a feature to a platform? Combining tools?
Grabbing low-hanging fruit from Twitter as well as exploring YouTube API.
- Anything else we should know: At most 1 non-long paragraph of useful additional context
- How is this project useful? It makes tweeted YouTube videos more accessible and creates a new way and experience for people to view, watch, and consume video.
- Where is this project going and what lessons/concepts can be applied to other projects? The project supports a more convenient way of discovering videos by allowing users to flip through vidoes rather than searching and deciding. It helps deal with the problem of how hard video is to search through, and could be useful for individuals, companies, and instutions that want to keep track of what content people are putting out on particular subjects. One example use case is that Al Jazeera could flip through quick snippets of what videos people have posted to help make decisions about what to cover--Mark plans to fork the project with this in mind. Next steps also include attaching to other social networks and directly to the YouTube API.
