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.