Magma

Hot Like Magma Full Screen Auto Player!

[From the Magma Newsletter May 23, 2011]

We have been quietly growing with new members and regular daily visitors over the past year and remain committed to providing the most useful and simple entry point into internet TV.

FULL SCREEN PLAYER!

Today we are pleased to announce a new HTML video player to watch any Magma channel (including your dashboard!) at full screen, with back-to-back, auto-play viewing.

For example: Want to watch the Reddit channel? (i.e. some of the most popular videos on Reddit right now?) Click on http://mag.ma/reddit and then view “Full” screen. This is designed for your own channel and even the categories within your channels too.

Once you are in full screen mode, just sit back and relax while Magma does the work. If desired, you can navigate backwards and forwards through a channel with the on-screen controllers or the left/right/spacebar keys.

Some other examples of uses for the full screen player: curate an hour long playlist of lean-back viewing for your friends to watch, full-screen, hand-free; create an influential channel that others can enjoy following to view on their internet connected TVs; keep a collection of videos to flip through full screen for future reference.

DID YOU KNOW?

Magma has an explainer video! See: http://mag.ma/15xtah

Most people who use Magma regularly visit the home page, especially the “Must Watch” channel to discover videos that are destined to become popular, BEFORE they become popular.

You can create your own personal auto-generating TV channel by following the channels you want. Each newly added video will appear in your Dashboard.

You can create a public channel from your favorite blog by adding the RSS feed to your settings import menu. Magma will look through each blog post and grab any videos that are mentioned and add them to the channel. For example, here is a channel for the wonderful Laughing Squid blog: http://mag.ma/laughingsquid Each new video is posted automatically to create the channel from the Laughing Squid RSS feed.

Instant video-adding/publishing is available via the Magma browser bookmarklet:

http://mag.ma/goodies/bookmarklet

Automatically add freshly uploaded videos to Magma! Just enter in a YouTube or Vimeo account name, or an RSS feed: http://mag.ma/settings/import

You can auto-sync your Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr accounts with a pre-formatted message to publish every time you add a video to your channel. http://mag.ma/settings/sharing

You can generate an RSS feed of almost any page on Magma by adding a ‘.rss’ to the end of any Magma URL. For example, if you would like an RSS feed of the Magma Top Video channel at http://mag.ma/leaderboard the RSS feed is http://mag.ma/leaderboard.rss

What features would YOU like to see?

GET INVOLVED!

Interested in investing? Interested in partnering? Let us know what’s on your mind, we’re open to exploring new business opportunities.

Magma has a full API! What can you do? http://docs.mag.ma/

We’re hiring! In search of ruby on rails engineers, please see: http://mag.ma/jobs

If you like Magma, you can help the most by getting the word out and letting people know! http://mag.ma

We’re proud to be supporting equality among video embeds!

rocketboomdev:

In today’s age, we don’t judge books by their covers. We judge them by their thumbnails. We also judge videos, e-books, software, and people the same way. Engaging an audience demands engaging them visually, no matter the medium. Some of our peers in the online video community recently noted that Tumblr allows the display of thumbnails for YouTube embeds on their dashboard, but other popular video sites, such as Vimeo and Blip.tv, are currently left out from showcasing their user videos with a thumbnail image.

Rocketboom R&D, the development unit of the Rocketboom network, has created a simple solution: a browser add-on that allows Tumblr users to see any video’s known thumbnail in their Tumblr dashboard. There’s no platform favoritism; this enables nearly every other common video platform the ability for thumbnail display. The add-on was created using Mag.ma, our own video aggregation service, to do thumbnail lookups for numerous video platforms with our simple API methods. The results? Uniformity for Tumblr users and creative support for content creators.

Get your browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, and visit the Tumblr Video Thumbnails add-on page for information, installation help, and more. Special thanks to our friends at Vimeo, Blip.tv, and Wreck & Salvage for their testing and support.

Wanted: Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer

Magma is looking for a serious, rockstar Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer in NYC!

Our ideal candidate is self-motivated and has demonstrable experience with web application development. You’ll be actively involved in the planning, design and implementation of our Rails applications, both front-end development and our back-end data collection engines.

If you’re a talented programmer, an ‘out of the box’ thinker, and someone who thrives in a small, fast-paced environment, talk to us!

(We’re also looking for a Juinor Web Developer / Designer.)

Magma API Public Launch

Today we are pleased to announce the launch of version 1.0.0 of the Magma API. These API methods will allow anyone to freely and openly identify videos, see our collected viewing metrics and social chatter as well as browse all of the Magma videos and channels.

Over the past year, Magma has collected information on popular and viral videos from across the web in an effort to understand the true scope of the online video arena. While we have analyzed this information for our own interests our goal has been to make this information available to anyone and everyone, from small content creators to large networked platforms, for free.

To jump right in, see our documentation at docs.mag.ma and sign up for our API mailing list. And please drop us a line and let us know if you develop something neat, we would love to hear about it!

Are you an IE8 user and use webslices? Go add our latest browser add-on, the Magma webslice to see the latest must watch and top videos!

More info at http://mag.ma/goodies/browser-add-ons

Import Videos from Your Blog or RSS feed

Our newest feature auto-imports videos from your blog directly into your Magma channel! With this great feature, we will be able to track and find even more great videos, and hopefully you will be the original contributor of an awesome video to Magma (a noteworthy accomplishment).

To add your blog URL or RSS feed, go to the Video Import section in your settings, select Blog RSS/XML, enter the blog or feed URL, and your blog or RSS feed will be indexed every hour.

Props to our awesome intern Ian Pearce for cranking out this feature and other great behind-the-scenes code. His work has allowed us to scrape even more blogs and services for videos for your enjoyment!

Magma has added a small but very exciting update to our search. Before, you could only search for videos and user channels. Our update now allows you to search all channels on Magma, both system and user channels. You’ll now be able to find results for channels like Huffington Post, Vimeo, Techcrunch, and many more!

Keep posted for some more exciting new features coming in the next few weeks!

New! Autoshare posts to Tumblr now includes the video description in your post and adds your categories as tags.

(Want to help add more awesome features? Come join our team!)

Wanted: Rails Developers

We are looking for talented Ruby on Rails developers in NYC (front & back-end). More info at http://mag.ma/jobs

(PS: Tell your friends!)

Magma to Tumblr: Can you hear me? Tumblr: Copy.

Magma now supports full integration with Tumblr! When adding videos to your Magma account you can automatically cross-post to Twitter, Facebook and now Tumblr simultaneously, with support for any of your Tumblr blogs, including group blogs.

We are excited to announce a few other new features too:

New Add to Channel Interface

We’ve also redesigned the channel video add experience, making it easier to see and customize the videos as you add them to your channel.

Customizable Share Message

Based on your feedback, you can now also customize the share message each time you add a video.

Explainer Video

The Magma user base has been growing rapidly over the last month, if you haven’t seen the Magma explainer video, have a look at http://mag.ma/211919

An extra special thanks to our lead developer Jamie Wilkinson and to head designer Greg Leuch for their extra hard work in building and operating the Magma platform.

http://mag.ma

Sharing Magma Videos on Facebook

We’ve added additional meta data to Magma videos so that they show up as embedded videos in your news feed when you share videos on Facebook and other social networking sites.

Keep up the video sharing with your friends! They enjoy it :)

Magma Feature Updates

With today’s release we have improved a great deal of our existing feature set, fine tuned the “Must Watch” section and are rolling out several new features, now found on the “goodies” page: http://mag.ma/goodies

1. Embeddable Widgets: Display your Magma videos on your blog or website – great for tastemakers and news blogs looking for a way to easily add relevant videos to their websites. http://mag.ma/goodies/widgets/jamiew

2. YouTube and Vimeo Importer: Magma can automatically track videos that you upload or favorite on YouTube and Vimeo. http://mag.ma/settings/import

3. RSS feeds: You can add ‘.rss’ to the end of any channel URL on Magma to get an RSS feed, or look for the feed links on the bottom of every page. For example, http://mag.ma/greg.rss

We are now spending the majority of our development efforts bringing the data & analytics behind Magma to the forefront. One of our primary goals is to provide publishers and marketers with the most comprehensive, real-time video statistics available, for free.

San Francisco Drink-up

Hi Dive Bar, Pier 28 1/2

Magma is co-hosting a San Francisco drink-up TONIGHT with Laughing Squid.

We will be outside at the Hi Dive Bar from 7p-11p, located at Pier 28 1/2 (Embarcadero & Bryant St). Come by and say hi!

Magma Open to Everyone

Today marks a big day for Magma — our website is now officially open to everyone. Sign up now if you have not already.

We owe a large thanks to the nearly five thousand beta users. Their wonderful suggestions and feedback were invaluable during our three month beta period. During that time, we have collected over 65,000 videos, millions of rows of video statistics, and tons of great feedback on what people want to do with the site.

Thanks again to everyone for their wonderful support! Keep your eyes peeled for new features and improvements.

The Magma Team
Andrew, Jamie, Kenyatta, Greg & Todd.

Twitter OAuth, Video Seeking, User Search, and Faster Servers

It has been a busy week at Magma and we are proud to announce a few new features and improvements.

Twitter OAuth has been added to Magma. You can now safely sync your Twitter account to Magma to allow for automatic tweeting of videos that you add to your channel. We also allow you to disable autotweeting at any time in your accounts settings. Click here to sync or resync your account. (Note: All users that were using autotweet must resync their Twitter account.)

As we continue to improve your online video watching experience, we’ve added video seeking when watching videos on the video archive page. You can now seek via previous and next through the videos within a user’s or system’s channel.

We’ve also added user searching so that you can connect and discover new content from users’ channels. Simply hover over the icon in the search bar to toggle between video and user search.

Along with these features, we’ve spent a good amount of time optimizing our back-end infrastructure and upgrading to newer, faster servers. These changes have already brought about a noticeable increase in speed and performance.

There are also numerous tweaks and changes we’ve completed. If you have suggestions or need to report a problem, please contact us.