ClipShare Blog

Danny Barla, CEO of ClipShare, the most popular video sharing script, has been interviewed by HotScripts for their February newsletter, regarding the Social Web phenomenon.

Greetings all,

Web 2.0 received a lot of hype and buzz last year. Whenever someone asks me what I think of ‘Web 2.0,’ I usually reply, “Web 2.0 is people-powered!” A lot of people associate Web 2.0 with fancy web design elements or AJAX. It has nothing to do with design or development trends - that’s just the natural evolution of the Web. Instead, Web 2.0 is a set of tools complementing how people interact with the each other and the Web.

Getting your site social doesn’t involve any rocket-science. You can add simple tools like social bookmarks, tagging, reviews, ratings, etc. This week, we talk to Danny, developer of Clip-Share and Media Share Suite, two popular social networking scripts.

- Ahmad Permessur
Newsletter Editor

Interview with Danny of Clip-Share.com

Danny, thanks a lot for joining us for this interview. Why don’t you get us started by telling us what ‘social web’ means to you?

If I were to define Social Web in two words, I would say “user interaction.” Social Web means providing Internet users with an online interactive community where multimedia file types can be stored and exposed to a world wide audience, and where members can interact which each other by various means, including messaging, rating or commenting. The “Social Web” term may also be used instead of “Web 2.0” as it is clearer what feature of the web is being referred to.

You’re the developer of two popular scripts – ClipShare and MediaShare. What are some of the social features that you’ve implemented in your products?

Our scripts are built from the ground up with the Social Web model in mind. They are pure Web 2.0 applications, offering a wide range of social features like: user community, media sharing, internal messaging, tagging, commenting, rating, bookmarking and embedding. The code and interface design meet the latest Web 2.0 technologies, trends and standards.

Now, that is a long list! As social sites continue to grow and become more popular, we’re certainly going to see patterns emerge. Can you identify any of these emerging patterns?

We have identified the following emerging patterns: identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputation and sharing.
Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related (contacts, friends, family, etc)
Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system
Groups - a way of forming communities of interest
Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who’s a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)
Some tools like reviews and comments have existed for some time - even before the terms ‘Social Web’ or ‘Web 2.0’ were coined. How would a review or comment script that was written 2-3 years ago be different today?

The web was more static previously and interactivity was limited. Now with social web, comments can be shared, bookmarked, emailed, tagged and replied to. Technologies have also evolved so much within the last few years, you can now use Ajax, for example, to submit a review or perform additional actions to it without reloading the page.

According to you, which sites deliver the most engaging social experience?

Facebook is the biggest thing to hit the social web sphere since MySpace and YouTube.

Do you think that the concept of ‘social web’ can be applied to any type of web site or this is something that pertains to community related sites only?

Certainly. As long as a site has content, I think some sort of community, thus social web, can be built around it.

If there is something that is hindering the web from being more social, what is it?

There are a couple of things that are not widely adopted, like cross authentication (e.g. OpenID), XML/RSS syndication, APIs to allow easy sharing of data, etc.

Finally, based on your experience, where do you see web application trends heading?

That would mostly depend on the complexity of the application. I am always in favor of implementing the latest available technologies. I have seen some amazing applications and examples developed using Flex or Flex2, which is a cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). Flex enables creating expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems.

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