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Zync: a new way to share videos

Today, we are happy to announce Zync, a video sharing plug-in for Yahoo! Messenger.

Like a lot of people, I tend to watch a lot of videos online. Most of what I watch, I share with my friends. No big surprise. Sometimes I’ll email a video to my parents and then call them later and ask them if they saw it. With my friends (more connected than my folks), I’ll fire off the link in Yahoo! Messenger. Then I wait. Occasionally I’ll type “did it load?” or “are you watching it yet?” More often, I’ll have to type “did you see the snowboard jump yet?” or “let me know when you see the puppet try to login”. It’s kinda difficult and not fun. If two people are standing by my laptop watching a video with me, we talk, pause, rewind, and chat about it, together.

So we built Zync: a plug-in for Yahoo! Messenger that allows videos from Yahoo!, YouTube, and Google to be shared in a synchronous manner. To the right is a screenshot of Zync in action. It allows people to watch videos together with their friends, in sync and in real time. Instead of just IMing URLs and waiting for friends to watch, Zync allows the users to converse about a video (pausing, jumping back, and watching together with a friend). Both people control the playback and both videos stay in sync.

Want to dive in and get started? You can check out this IM-it button:

You can check out more information about the plug-in and how to download it on the Zync website. If you are a little savvy and want to embed the IM-it button on your website or automatically embed the IM-it button with Greasemonkey, check out Zync on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

A Call for Creativity and Cognition

Creativity is very important for many people, including many of us here. Everyday we are creating personal and social media: photos on Flickr, movies remixes on Jumpcut, blog posts on various topics personal and professional, discussions on each other’s creative ideas and works. When we are not tending to our personal media (read: at work), we are thinking of and building tools to allow people (including ourselves) to be even more creative in new and exciting ways (check out our work on Remix and TagMaps).

We have begun to think about creativity, what it means to apply some structure to creative acts, and how we might better understand the creative process. The act of formally structuring some process is at the heart of software design. Yet, when it comes to the creative process, structure is often frowned upon and the process remains in the realm of the unexplainable, shrouded in mystery and mysticism. Drawing from the work of artists like Kandinsky and Duchamp, we want to better describe how digital creativity happens, so as to build better tools for supporting it. Along the way we hope to make visible new forms of creativity and expression which will suggest new goals for the greater research and design community.

Sound good so far? Have you been thinking about creative processes? We are hosting a workshop at ACM’s Creativity and Cognition 2007 on Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination and have an open call for position statements. We encourage anyone interested from all walks (pro or con, artist or engineer) to check it out and submit a short position statement.

See you at the conference in June!

Y!RB Caught on “Tape”

Want to get a sense of the buzz at Y!RB? Head over to Yodel Anecdotal and see a video (direct link) made by our friends in Corporate Communications. You’ll also get an introduction to Yahoo! Research by Bradley Horowitz, who happens to be our boss. BTW, there’s still an opportunity to join the fun this summer.