YouTube, launched in Feb 2005, seems to be one of the most popular social video sites on the web. It’s fast, has a nice clean interface and a nice selection of features:
* Flash video
* A description of the video (you’d be surprised how many sites don’t have this!)
* easily copied video URL and embedded player
* tags and ratings
* user info, friends, favortites, presence
* play lists
* trackback links with stats!

For example, for the video “Hope” (a moving anti-gang violence music video) shows:
Sites linking to this video:
» 83 clicks from http://www.webhere.com.br/video/
» 45 clicks from http://www.myspace.com/
» 17 clicks from http://www.myspace.com/strongyouth
» 14 clicks from http://www.friendster.com/user.php
» 7 clicks from http://www.offuhuge.com/v4/music-video-codes-debuts6

Even though YouTube does seem to be more well-known, I originally found it through TagWorld (which is now too slow to review). At the time amongst the less imaginative videos of girls dancing in front of the camera, I saw this fun home-grown music video “hey clip” hosted by YouTube. (Two young women lip-sync “Hey” by the Pixies.)

It’s nice to know the social video sites are being social with each other :)

Grouper is a P2P file sharing program focused on helping people share videos with people they know. Their web site offers some very nice social video features. The home page has fabulous implementation of a “video wall.” It’s actually a wall of thumbnails, but it is also a dynamic Flash app that serves as navigation into the site. The images cycle randomly making it so you could use this as a primary video selector and not get bored. I like this because it transforms web video into a “lean back” experience similar to television or movies, which seems appropriate for a video surfing experience.

I’d love to know who made this. The Grouper web site is notably barren of credits. I particularly like the attention to detail concerning the how the thumbnails animate larger and smaller on rollover. This is the kind of thing Laszlo paid special attention to at when designing its animator tag. I’m always impressed with Flash developer’s who get it right, without extra support from the platform. If you play with the app you’ll notice that the enlarging animation is interrupted when your mouse rolls out of the image. Another nice touch is that the shrinking animation is slower than the enlarging animation, which causes a neat “trail” effect when you float your mouse across several images. Its particlarly nice in a circular pattern.

And, last but not least, I found one of my favorite web videos of all time while browsing the Grouper video wall: the llama song.

[update: I heard from Duncan Meech at Grouper who created the “video wall” I describe in this post. He used a tool called NeoSwiff that allows you to code flash using a class library that is very a stripped down version of the .NET base classes.]

Online video sites suddenly seem to be widely availablle. I’ve been checking out a few of them, and for the first time this morning, I saw a video worth writing home about:

The others uploaded by pepevi23 are also quite nice. I’d love to know the origin of these, which seem likely to be commercials for a new phone that plays music or maybe pepevi23 is just a fan.

ClipShack was launched in June 2005 by the folks at Reality Digital right here in San Francisco.