Whither Yurth?

From an email to one of our favorite users, L’agent Provocateur, who was kind enough to check in with us last week:

Cool stuff going on with Yurth, in the form of development (new tricks and gizmos in the works) and investors to fund it. All of which means that priorities get scrambled up. Although we’re still focused on making Yurth easy, easy for fun, personal video. Like quick little rants, missed connections, people connecting with people… We’re working on a mobile upload thing, for example. And we’re working on a cool way for each user to have their own personalized map (tabs, favorites, default location, etc.) Takes a hell of a lot of time and some extra $$ but very fun and we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
Thanks for your stuff and we want see more.

Missed Connections

The thing is this: as a result of our (several) recent 10-hour roundtrip drives to Silicon Valley and our (several) meetings with some really awesome Web dudes & dudettes (thanks Chi-Hua, David, Fern, Ariel, David #2, David #3…) we’ve come up with something even better than our previously announced contest.

It’s… a different contest.

In addition to casting our net for any- and everyone we can find to share their vids with the world on Yurth, we want to explore letting Yurth grow in very specific ways. Some call this editorial direction. We, too, call it editorial direction. We also call it playing to our strengths.

Before leaping headlong, caution-to-the-wind into Web 2.0, we produced TV shows (still do, truth be told). In the past month or so, Yurth has made an impression on certain agents and producing partners, as well as the afore-mentioned Web gurus. With their guidance we’ve put into development a TV series based on our favorite-est of all personals categories: Missed Connections.

Now this is where you come in: your Video Missed Connection post. (“Whole Foods, last Friday. I was near the aovcados, you looked up from the bulk dried fruits. Our eyes met…”) It’s GOLD. Potential gold, anyway. Pull out your Webcam, your camera phone or your camcorder, record your missed connection story, then upload it to Yurth.

Then comes the fun part. Get your friends in on the act, build some word of mouth and try to track down your missed connection.

We’ll be flagging the best missed connections and watching the responses — from friends, from witnesses, from rivals. It’ll all go into the mix as we piece together stories for Missed Connections, the series.

Your Missed Connection video on Yurth: free. Hearing back from the one that got away him- or herself… priceless.

They Might Be Giants "Venue Songs" on Yurth.com

From our Digg about the Venue songs:

The complete series of animated shorts, “Venue Songs” salute each stop on a TMBG tour a couple years back. John Hodgman is a deranged millionaire who puts them up to it. On Yurth.com each short is pinned to the tour city that inspired it. Yurth is a map-based site for uploading, browsing and sharing vids, YouTube meets Craigslist with a cool map to navigate.



read more | digg story

At This Time We Would Like to Announce… A Contest!

Seeking Ranters, Ravers, Missers of Connections; Posters of Personals; Lonely Hearts, Full to Overflowing Hearts; Job Lookers; House Sharers, Future Roommates; God-like Bands; Arranged Marriage-Brokering Mothers; Public Displayers, and People Who Just Noticed Something Cool and Want to Point it Out:

If you…

a) Live Someplace on the Earth
b) Fit Any of the Above Categories
c) Can Get Your Claws on a Video Camera

…Then Shout it out loud on Yurth.com.

Go to www.Yurth.com to get the lowdown on our fantastically fun and easy-to-win Contest. Start posting video, get your crowd in on it. On June 1 someone’s gonna walk with a sweet Apple MacBook.

And if you don’t quite win, but get close, you win stuff for that, too.

Might as well have something to show for your Public Display of whatever.

Go on! That address again: www.yurth.com

Got Video on Your Mobile Phone?

We have a lot of big ideas, and among the biggest is that you, gentle Yurth user, will soon be uploading right from your camera phone to Yurth. But that’s soon, not now. And you want to get your on-the-fly video up to Yurth immediately. We don’t blame you.

So for the time being, we’ve got a great solution.

We like Twango a lot. It’s a great place to upload video straight from your mobile phone before posting it to Yurth.

First, set up a Twango account and create your own channel(s). This takes all of about 48 seconds, even for the likes of us.

Next, we’ll hand it over the Twango folks to do the rest of the ’splaining:

One of the most fun ways to get media into Twango is directly from your camera phone. Camera phones do not yet have the photo quality of dedicated digital still cameras, but your camera phone has one key advantage: You always have it with you! And as photography enthusiasts often say, the best camera in the world is the one you actually have with you.

All modern camera phones have the ability to send photos, videos, audio clips and other media via the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). And most also have the ability to send email. After you’ve captured media, there is usually an option to send it via MMS or email.

To upload media to one of your Twango channels from your camera phone, you will need to know your channel’s email upload address, which you can find on the channel settings page. When you want to upload media from your phone, simply specify that address and the media will be placed in your channel.

So you’re on the go, you capture something earthshattering on your video-capable mobile phone or PDA, and in a few thumbstrokes voila, it’s in your Twango media box. From there, you log on to Yurth and uplaod freely!

Yurth’s co-Founder Rob Long on Marketplace

“This is the kind of spontaneous publicity that makes people!”

–Steve Martin, The Jerk

Listen here to Yurth co-Founder Rob Long giving the Yurth elevator pitch on American Public Media’s Marketplace, Thursday March 15, 2007.

TABS

When we first went live back in July and showed the site to friends and family (and the strangers we blindsided in coffee shops), the first thing people said was, “where are the tabs?”

And sure enough, there were none. So we nosed around the 60 million other video sites and found that many of them use tabs. But they use them in a real “who cares” way. We’ve got a way better way of doing tabs.

Coming the first week of November, we’ll go live with a truly unique tab-based video categorization capability. At first, every clip in Yurth will be categorized and the map will be filterable by clicking the tabs across the top of the screen.

Then, it gets better. More about that later.

YouTube on Yurth

A few weeks ago the guys at Metal Toad created a program that uses YouTube’s API to pull content over to Yurth, geo-tag it and paste it to our map. Now we’re figuring out our priorities for what we’ll pull over, and when. And from whom. We can pull content from all over the web (as long as sites’ APIs allow) and make it part of Yurth.

Now the map is filling up. It looks more like this:

The red dots are the YouTube videos. Blue are our own local clips.

the shape of yurth to come

We can’t wait to shed our old skin and slip into this one. It’s courtesy of our crack design team at kapow.

Catch Your Eye?

It caught ours.