Review Our Mashup: CrowdTube.tv

[coryshaw]

I'd love to get some feedback on a recently launched mashup idea. http://crowdtube.tv finds trending youtube videos and plays them like a never-ending TV show.

Built on Django, we use cookies to keep track of what you've watched(may move toward HTML5 local DB...but trying to avoid register/login), and we use jquery/ajax to make it feel like a TV station.

A little background:

I'm always annoyed when I try to watch short YouTube videos on Digg/Reddit/Etc... while I'm eating or just chilling on the couch, and pretty much hate Cable TV with a passion, so we built this out of necessity to fill the void.

While I'm not an active contributor here, I know the community is great at giving open, honest, and constructive feedback on ideas...so I'd really appreciate to hear what you think.

Thanks! Cory

[philwhln]

Hi Cory. Could you make it so that next button doesn't disappear? I tend to hover over next buttons so that I can click next, click next, click next, but it had faded away when I wanted to click it. Also, you might want to be careful of what videos you show, or have categories / ratings. One of first that came up was a man being mauled by a lion with a screaming crowd. It was quite shocking. I think the idea is good (the site, not being mauled by a lion). It's something that I think is lacking from YouTube, although it is now possible with music videos.

[coryshaw]

Thanks for your feedback. It may not have been obvious in the intro screen, but we've enabled keyboard controls so that you can use your left/right arrows to skip back/forward, up/down arrows to control the volume, spacebar to play/pause, etc.

Knowing that, would you still want the arrows there?

[philwhln]

Cool, keyboard shortcuts are great, but easy to forget, so visual controller are always good.

[coryshaw]

Additionally, we're still fine-tuning the algorithm that determines when to show what videos, but in general we want it to reflect what the masses think are the best...brutality and all.

[philwhln]

Maybe that can be your tagline...

"Streaming what the masses think are the best...brutality and all"