The Road to Showyou 3.0

This morning, we’ve launched the latest version of our award-winning iPad app, Showyou.

We’ve been working hard on this version of the app for many months, and thought some of you might like to hear about the thinking behind this very big update.

Over the summer, we started looking at how people were using Showyou, and who was getting the greatest benefit and the most enjoyment from it. And two things caught our attention: that a lot more video comes through our users’ Twitter feeds than their Facebook feeds; but, conversely, more people connect Showyou to Facebook than to Twitter. If you connected Showyou to both Twitter and Facebook, you’d have an amazing experience. But, of course, not everyone has an account on both of these networks.

So the question was, how could we make the app better for everyone, but particularly for people who don’t use social networks, or weren’t seeing many videos from the social networks they do use?  How could we make it easier for them discover people and channels on Showyou that they might like to follow? How could we make it easier to browse collections of videos they might like?

This new version of the app makes it easier to find people and channels you might want to follow, and gives you new and fun ways to browse videos you might want to watch. When you sign up, we now connect you not only to your friends already on the app, but to the friends of your friends. You can slide the grid to the right to open our new tray to browse and explore by category. It’s a great new way to find channels you might want to watch, or follow.

There are other new, fun ways to find interesting people on Showyou. When you watch a video, you can see all the people on Showyou who have shared it; just tap an icon for one of those users to visit their grid.  It’s a great, fun way to find people who share your tastes, and to see what else they’ve shared. Just follow the people on Showyou who are sharing great videos, and you’ll see those in your grid.

Another thing we learned from talking with people using the app was that they loved the fun open-ended nature of the 2D grid, but that they wanted to be able to zoom in to see videos from a specific social network, or someone they were following, and to be able to browse those videos in a more structured, linear way so as not to miss anything.

So this new version of Showyou has a wonderful new way to zoom from the more free-form 2D grid down to a specific 1D grid that you can scroll vertically. Just tap a user icon to go to that user’s grid. Or, tap the Twitter or Facebook icons to see grids of videos from your friends and people you follow on those networks.

In addition to zooming to 1D grids from the 2D grid, you can also use our new tray to navigate to other, related grids. No matter where you are on the app, you can swipe open the Showyou tray and it will offer both context and browsing options related to the grid you’re on.

Open up the tray from the 2D grid and you can navigate to specific social network grids or to category grids. Open the tray when you’re on a category grid, and you’ll see a list of channel grids by category. Open the tray when you’re on a profile grid, and you’ll see additional information about that person, and a list of people they’re following as well as a list of their followers. It’s just a swipe away.

A lot of this sounds simple, and easy, but getting these new interactions right took many months. We started the planning for this version right after our last update in August, and began work in earnest on this version in October, with many, many iterations to get to this version we’re launching today. We would design, build, play with and test the app, then repeat. We wanted to make going from the 2D grid to these 1D grids simple, easy and understandable. And we wanted to make the tray both fun to use and a useful resource, always a swipe away.

In the end, even though this is technically an update to our app, we probably put as much work into building this version as we did making the very first version of Showyou we launched in April 2011. We’re really proud of what we’ve built, and we’re excited for people to try it out and to hear your thoughts on how we can make Showyou better still.

Revolutionizing How and When We Watch

Earlier this week, YouTube announced some mind-blowing statistics: each minute, sixty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. That’s one hour of video uploaded to YouTube every second.

It’s a stunning engineering achievement, and definitive proof that YouTube has revolutionized the distribution of video.

But a new revolution — in how and when we watch all this video — is underway.

We thought we’d share (for the first time publicly) some data from our Showyou app for the iPad that points out where we’re headed:

TV Length Sessions with YouTube Videos.
Every time someone opens up Showyou on the iPad, they watch, on average, 8 videos. Session lengths on Showyou — the amount of time people spend on our iPad app — are 35-40 minutes.

During Prime Time & On Weekends.
Peak times for Showyou on the iPad are between 8-11PM on weekdays, and afternoons on Saturdays and Sundays. Indeed, we see more activity on Saturday and Sunday on Showyou than any other time.

That’s a big change from what we’ve previously seen with video on the web — where peak usage is at Noon on a weekday, and  people dip in to watch one or two videos at a time (so-called video snacking).

A lot of this has to do with the iPad itself, of course. There is a daypart to our device usage now, and we’ve welcomed the iPad into our evenings and weekends — something we never quite did with the PC. We use it curled up in bed, or in a big stuffy chair, or when we’re at the local coffee shop.

And part of it has to do with our ability to build new kinds of immersive, engaging experiences on new devices like the iPad. With our Showyou app we combined the powers of three platforms — videos from services like YouTube and Vimeo; the touch-driven ease of the iPad; and the taste data from social services like Twitter and Facebook — we’ve been able to build a new type of experience, one that’s more immersive, that engages people more deeply and for longer periods of time.

YouTube made it easy and free for anyone to publish a video, and launched a revolution in how we distribute video. Social video apps like Showyou are adding a crucial missing component — a way to tap into this massive firehose of video and find the best stuff with a few swipes and taps, in a way that’s fun, simple, and social.

Announcing Showyou for the Kindle Fire

Showyou — picked by Apple as the Best of the iPad Social Networking category on the App Store for 2011 — is now also available on the Kindle Fire.

It’s available on the Amazon store now. (It will also work on other 7″ tablets running Android 2.3.3 or higher).

If you’ve got a Kindle Fire, try it out and let us know what you think.

500 Hours on Twitter

Every day on Showyou, we see 3-4 million links to videos from our members’ Twitter feeds. We took a snapshot of the most popular videos every 15 minutes for three weeks in November and December. This shows the Top 100 changing over time. Each second of the video represents 150 minutes of elapsed time.

11 for 11: The Top Eleven Videos of 2011 on Showyou

We’re doing a little digging through our stats, and looking back at the past 8 months since Showyou launched. Given we see millions of new videos every month shared by our users and their friends on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, we thought it might be useful to look back at the most shared videos of 2011 on Showyou.

Here they are:

#11:

#10:

#9:

#8:

#7:

#6:

#5:

#4:

#3:

#2:

#1:

As you might surmise, the first couple of hundred thousand folks using Showyou are a geeky lot!  But, we think it also points to the growing popularity of, and incredible interest in, technology more broadly.

We’ll be sharing more trends from 2011 in upcoming posts.

Good Company

Apple’s Top Apps of 2011 for the Social Networking category in its Rewind2011 feature on the AppStore:

20 Million Hand-Picked Videos, Now on Showyou

Last Tuesday, we passed a significant milestone — we added the 20 millionth video to the Showyou search engine. In the week since we passed that milestone, we’ve added another 1 million videos to our search engine.

But here’s the truly amazing thing about that: every one of the videos in our search engine is there because someone on Showyou shared it, or one of their friends on Facebook or Twitter did. Computers didn’t decide that these video are worth watching; people did.

In a world where more programming will get uploaded to YouTube in the next week than you can watch in your lifetime, this kind of human filtering is critical. When you’re searching for something to watch, you need human signals to tell you if something is funny or beautiful or awesome. Showyou does that; it tames the chaos of the web.

Good Company

Two recent pieces of news.

We’re pleased to be part of the select group of folks Twitter has highlighted to celebrate the arrival of iOS5, and the deep integration with Twitter it affords. Nice!

More good company to be found in the Wired Magazine “App Guide” — their review of essential tools for your iOS and Android devices. Showyou was named by Wired as one of “25 Outstanding Social Apps” — the list also included Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Skype, Instagram, and Foursquare. Howdy neighbors!

The Video Firehose

Showyou is a great way, the best way, to see all the videos shared on your favorite social networks — videos from people you follow on Twitter, or shared by your friends on Facebook.

How videos from our users’ Twitter and Facebook feeds get onto Showyou involves some computational magic. Once our users connect Showyou to their Twitter or Facebook accounts, we continuously scan their feeds (all day, everyday) and look at the links in those feeds. When we see a video that will play on the iPad and iPhone, we grab it.

As the chart below shows, when we started out in April, we were pulling in about 500,000 videos per day from our users’ feeds on Twitter and Facebook (of course, not all of them unique — there are many duplicates in that number).  In the first ten days of October, we’ve pulled in, on average, about 3 million videos per day from those feeds.

On Tuesday, we pulled in 3.9M videos from our users’ feeds.

Three quarters (75%) of those videos were from our users’ Twitter feeds. That’s especially astonishing given we have about twice as many users who have connected Showyou to Facebook as to Twitter. On average, users who have connected Showyou to Twitter see ten times the number of videos from their friends or people they follow as users who have connected to Facebook.

This really makes clear this essential point: if you use Twitter, you’ll absolutely want to use Showyou. A lot of videos get shared in your Twitter feeds, people. And Showyou is the an essential video app that helps you to keep track of, and watch, all of them.

And with yesterday’s announcements, its’ easier than ever to connect Showyou with your Twitter account on the iPad or iPhone.

Showyou, Now with more Twitter

We’re huge fans of Twitter, and so we were thrilled when Apple announced in June (at WWDC) that Twitter would be deeply integrated in to the new iOS5 software launched today.

What could be better?

Twitter has always been an integral part of the Showyou experience. And if you’re a Twitter user and have an iPhone or iPad, Showyou is a must-have app. After all, Showyou provides the very best way to watch all the videos shared by people you follow on Twitter, in a “beautifully interactive 2D wall will give you material to watch for days.”

With iOS5, the pairing of Showyou with Twitter is tastier than ever. With your Twitter account, you can sign up for Showyou with a simple tap. Amazing. Just one tap to start seeing all the videos from people you follow on Twitter, in one place on your iPad or iPhone.

When you see a video on Showyou from a friend on Twitter, you can reply to their tweet, mark it as a favorite, or share it with others.  And with the new “tweet sheet” built in to iOS5, sharing a video from Showyou to your friends on Twitter has never been easier.

This is just the start. We will be adding further ways for our users to incorporate Twitter into their Showyou experience in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!