Vimeo: Taking Video from Commodity to Community

Hung out with my good buddy last weekend. Jon is one of those rare people with whom I have an endless number of things to talk about. Which is fortunate, because he talks a lot. :) Jon has a really cool job running Business Development and Marketing at CollegeHumor. Those who know him know that there is no better person in the world for that job.

One cool thing he showed me was Vimeo. The best way to describe it is a video version of Flickr. Vimeo really gets how take a relative commodity, streaming video, and build a great community around it. The site doesn't focus on stolen clips, but instead on interesting original user-generated content. The feel of the site is much warmer, more creative and cooler than the bigger players. To immediately see how different it is from a site like YouTube, check the comments on posted videos. YouTube comments seem to almost always be negative, poorly written and rude. Vimeo's comments are positive, witty and helpful.* It is just a much better vibe and cooler product. The guys at Connected Ventures have, once again, done a great job.

In the meantime, here are two Vimeo clips of his trip that Jon uploaded:

Matt tours the Stanford d.school on Vimeo

Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, at night, just after it rained. on Vimeo

* Hey Jon, you should upload your "Stuck in the Elevator" clip to YouTube so we can do a comparison of the types of comments generated by the two sites.

Comments

[Jon]

I'm waiting for some other YouTube fanboy to steal my Stuck in an Elevator clip and upload it themselves to YT. That's usually how it goes.

Here it is:
http://www.vimeo.com/clip:136070

[Avi]

Hey...really cool video, but Jon you should know better. You need to license these songs!

[College Dating]

Enjoy the video, nice catch!

[Jon]

Jakob, Vimeo founder, did this experiment and blogged it here.

http://obeastiality.com/post/9242065