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.