VideoSurf Brings Video Search to Twitter Jun 18, 20098:00 PDT

Videosurf.com is now powering video searches from within Twitter!

Anyone on Twitter (whether they follow @videosurf or not) can now search through VideoSurf’s rapidly growing index of over 50 billion visual moments from great sites like YouTube, CNN, ESPN, Hulu, MTV, MSN, Comedy Central, and more without ever leaving their Twitter stream. By combining the Twitter API and the bit.ly API with our own VideoSurf API, VideoSurf has created a mashup that gives you one more reason to watch video all day long.

Performing a VideoSurf search on Twitter is easy:

1. In the Twitter post field, simply type @videosurf

2. then type “s” (as in search)

3. then a description of the video you want to search for

VideoSurf adds a New Voice to the Web Video Conversation Jun 11, 20094:48 PDT

My name is Jeff, and I’m a videoholic; I love film and video the way others love puppies or dancing or clean, dry socks. Stories told with moving images have captivated me my entire life. There are movies and television episodes that I remember with a fondness normally reserved for childhood romances and trust funds.

VideoSurf’s New Release Jun 10, 20097:59 PDT

VideoSurf’s latest release is out and we’ve got some exciting new developments to share with you.  In addition to the updated look and feel, we made some big improvements to key areas including search relevancy (spam detection, video deduplication), people spotlighting, and our homepage.  This new release is all about helping you find what you’re looking for, faster.  Whether that’s a search result, a celebrity, or a cool video to watch, we’re working harder to make sure you spend less time searching and more time being entertained.

Announcing: New Search and Video Lookup APIs May 14, 20098:05 PDT

Do you have a website with videos on it? Do you want to hack some new features into your homegrown DVR? Do you want to add contextually related videos from around the web on your site? Do you want to create a revolutionary, new UI for searching and browsing videos? If you answered yes to any of those questions, or if you’ve got an innovative use for VideoSurf’s unique video metadata and search results, then we’ve got something for you.

We’re very happy to announce the release of two brand new APIs for public use.

1. Video Search API - Perform any query and retrieve relevant videos. Highlights include:
   • Ability to refine search result sets by people that appeared in the videos (e.g. find the episode of Friends where Brad Pitt guest starred)
   • Include/exclude results by video provider (e.g. filter out Youtube videos or only show Comedy Central videos)
   • Refine results by content type (e.g. show only Full TV Episodes or exclude slideshows)
   • For each video, get back VideoSurf’s unique visual summary, related topics, an intelligently selected thumbnail and more
2. Video Lookup API - Retrieve detailed information about specific videos. Highlights include:
   • Lookup by VideoSurf video id or by the source url (e.g. Get VideoSurf’s visual summary for a Youtube or Hulu video using its url)
   • For each video, get back VideoSurf’s unique visual summary, related topics, an intelligently selected thumbnail and more

Our popular Videos at a Glance Firefox Extension is built on top of the Video Lookup API and is just one example of the usefulness of such a lookup service. Think Greasemonkey.

To see the search API in action, you can visit these pages from our friends at The Car Connection and Kosmix.

If you’re ready to dig in, there are a couple of examples that will help you get started. For more information and the full documentation, please visit our API Overview.

If you build something cool with these APIs please let us know so that we can show off your work on our API examples page. Thanks!

Quickly search for videos in Firefox with VideoSurf & Ubiquity Apr 1, 200912:57 PDT

Most of you probably haven’t heard about Ubiquity yet, but it’s a new project from Mozilla Labs that looks to make Mozilla Firefox much more useful.  Still in a testing stage, Ubiquity is already a great tool and we took it upon ourselves to make it even better. In their own words:

You’re used to telling Firefox where you want to go by typing Web addresses into the URL bar. With Ubiquity installed, you’ll be able to tell Firefox what you want it to do by typing commands into a new Ubiquity input box.

Our new command is built into Ubiquity and will run a VideoSurf search, showing you videos from all over the Web instantly. Our unique visual summary makes it easy for you to see at-a-glance which videos you want to watch. We’ll also let you jump to a particular moment in that video, and show you which people appear frequently in your search results and let you find more videos about those people.

Here are a couple of screenshots of it in action. Once installed, all you have to do is bring up the Ubiquity command window and type “videos [any query]“.

Installing Ubiquity is as easy as installing any other Firefox extension. You can find it here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity. (Direct link to xpi file)

Once you’ve done that, you can summon Ubiquity by tapping option-space on the Mac, or control-space if you’re on Windows. On Linux, try alt-space. Then type “videos [your query]“.

That’s it. Try it out!

We’d really love to hear feedback and ideas, so please email us at feedback@videosurf.com. Thanks!