Meanwhile on the West Coast – Nico-ish platforms in the West
Oregon-based tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick has just posted an introduction into Nico Nico Douga on ReadWriteWeb. The article compares Nico Nico Douga favorably to Youtube Annotations, which allows uploaders to add comments to their own videos. Youtube annotations is at its beta stage. Comments can include links. Basically, it is a kind of Nico Script (which allows uploaders to add links) without Nico Nico Douga (which allows all users to comment, among many other new interactive features).
He also compares Nico Nico Douga to http://viddler.com, where all users can add comments in little popup windows directly on the videos, together with their user ID. Marshall Kirkpatrick argues that Nico Nico Douga achieves, what Viddler does not: Comments are “an integral part of the user experience” and “not intrusive”. For me it becomes even clearer, how important the absence of user IDs in the comments is: Comments with IDs disturb the viewing experience - they ad too many personalities and too little group. What remains to be found out is, whether this is a problem of the interface, or of the Western mind in general.
Talking about comments... Just as useful as the post itself are the comments that Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post has received. Here you can find further services: Some of them are still online (http://omnisio.com), some if them are now deceased (http://mojiti.com/), some of them are designed for collaboration of work teams http://protonotes.com/).
Nigel Pegg suggests an application that allows you to synchronise video watching in small groups, which then interact with each other. So this is not live broadcast, but user-controlled sychronisation of streamed video. The idea is still at prototype stage. It is a bit like an automated version of the shared video watching practices in the early 90ties on Japan’s Nifty (see the last post on Hikawa-san). We heard in our focus groups here in Japan, that some users combine a hand-made synchronous start of Nico videos with Skype. Users already make the effort. So the combination of user-controlled sychronisation and streamed comments (or other forms of communication) might indeed be a smart idea.
