In my previous article, I talked a little about why Viewplicity changed its focus over the last year. There was a growing excitement as our work started to rally behind the concept of making live video as easy to use as Flash movie clips. Especially once we were embroiled in the thousands of lines of code, in various languages, that would be required. It just didn’t make sense to write that much code for one small application.

Why does it take that much code? We’ll work up to answering that.

Live collaboration requires, at the core, the ability for users to somehow get connected and to know when they are online. A lot of the large, public sites like Facebook and Tokbox are predominately about aggregating users in large numbers and somehow “owning” those users. Their presence features, the features that allow people to know when they can talk to other, are largely designed with this aggregation in mind. They obviously have a need for people to register with their site in order to use their services – that is the core of their business models.

Small web sites like churches, schools, families, and small for-profit businesses have their own memberships. They are increasingly using these sites to communicate. Even many individuals have created their own sites in order to communicate with others. When someone comes to a site like this, it is a little unnatural to have to go log in somewhere else to get something done. People put video clips on their web site. Why don’t they just point somewhere else and have their users go there to watch it? Well, it’s just not natural. We felt that someday it would feel just as unnatural to have to go to a third party site and log in to communicate with live video. Obviously, we don’t quite feel that way yet because there is the matter of the missing glue. Not only does the web site access to a lot of software, it needs access to some sort of transport service to carry the live video – to record it and offer archives on it, etc.
We observed that were some components on the market that could plug into a web site under certain conditions, but even to the degree that these components had some of the needed functionality, their companies lacked the desire to offer the service to connect the users and transport the video – they generally sent the web builder to someone else for this piece of the glue. These components were either free and of dubious use or were fairly expensive and still didn’t offer the service piece of the glue. The service providers in this area (Influxis, Amazon, etc.) were more than happy to offer the transport, but didn’t offer the code needed on the web site in a form that was simple enough for a non-programmer to use.

The idea behind Viewplicity has changed somewhat over the last year.

Our partners joined initially to create a web application for what we perceived as a burgeoning and somewhat underserved market – the senior citizens. Our initial idea was to bring some of our experience in collaboration technology (especially video) and offer it in an easy to use manner to families, allowing grandparents to share video (recorded and live) with their grandchildren. We suspected that the user interfaces for such sites should in some way be geared differently – perhaps larger icons along with simpler and more targeted feature sets. We thought we could get the families connected with a powerful, but simple to use feature set – live, multiparty video with recording capability at a minimum.

We suspected that most of the technology for this application was readily available to us, requiring only a little loving care and some “glue code” to hold it together. We knew we wanted to focus on Flash as the underlying technology for getting these groups connected and we knew Flash was everywhere, well supported in the development community.

There were two things that diverted us from this original plan. First, most people we talked to about “our plan” had a different idea of how to use video on either their web site or some fantasy site – scouting, churches, sales venues, apartment complexes, schools, charity projects, home owner’s associations. Just as web sites are continually erected for small groups like these, we were hearing of interest expressed for the people in these groups to collaborate on their own sites, in their own groups, about their own interests.

The other was how much glue it was going to take to get the kind of features we deemed desirable for even these simple applications. Flash is a great tool and, in the hands of a fairly experienced programmer, can be used for extraordinary things. Most people associate it with the movie/animation clips they see on many web sites today. Frequently, these clips can be placed on the web site by just copying some tags from somewhere on the Internet. But the ubiquitous Flash player can be used for additional things like creating broadcast groups, sending/receiving/recording live video in these groups, providing remote control of applications in these groups – things simply not achievable last year by just the copying of web site tags.

That’s what changed us. We began to see the myriad of small web sites and their user groups that could benefit from live video and we developed a desire to offer the glue to make extensive features as easy to put on a site as movie clips – mostly a copy and paste operation.

We learned that Viewplicity should be focused on the glue.