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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Many of our loyal users have asked for RSS feeds of their channels as ways to distribute the videos they find and collect. You can now grab a public RSS feed from any channel, including your own channel videos. Feeds are also available for each category in your channel.
You may also note that the site is now running fast and smoother than before, thanks to the amazing optimizations from our amazing development team.
