We added this *hot* new feature over the weekend. I'm talking Paris Hilton HOT. Seriously. And I thought listening to measly 30-second clips of music was cool.
It started on Thursday. After scooting into work I walked upstairs to the office. I was preparing myself for the day, planning to fix a few bugs and get ready for a new feature Josh and I were about to start working on. As soon as I walked into the room I knew something was up. I got that 6th sense feeling of a new idea about to hatch. Sure enough, I saw Hadi waving his hands over in Josh and Gabe's corner of the room going on about something (our "office" is an open floorplan that is just barely, but not quite, big enough for all of us).
"Not just music clips", Hadi was explaining, "but music videos!". I got his drift, and sat down to mock something up. It should be noted that Josh and Nat had been talking about something similar months back, but neither of them were *this* enthusiastic about it. In his typical eager fashion Hadi had mentioned it was only a "3-hour project", so the challenge was on! I cracked open a Dr. Pepper and got down to it. Hadi offered to bring back lunch if I'd keep working on it (of course I accepted), and by 12:30 I had a working version with playable videos and real code hooked up to whatever song you were listening to. This was cool. Yeah, it needed a lot more polish, but the look and feel was there, and there was no question that this thing was addictive and fun to play with.
After pushing the changes out to our test server so that everyone else could play with it, I spent the rest of the day polishing and tightening it up and adding a few more features. While I was coding, Hadi quickly wrote up a spec to make it all legit, along with what new features and fixes we should have for the next 3 versions. The next day, Friday, we all tested the heck out of it, I fixed a few more bugs, and we agreed that we should really ship this thing ASAP. Testing the feature was really hard since everyone wanted to just keep watching videos! By Saturday we had it staged and ready to roll out to production, and by that evening it was fully shipped.
From an idea, to a spec, to development, to testing, and to production, all in less than 72 hours. Yes, I love my job :D
Try it out! I'm enamored with Imogen Heap right now, so go to http://ilike.com/artist/Imogen+Heap, listen to the first track (Hide and Seek) and click Play video. You can click any of the 4 videos on the right of the playing video to select an alternate version.
Until the next feature!
steve
love the site perhaps you could send some people down our way
www.incrediblemp3.com
Posted by: incrediblemp3 dotcom | November 08, 2006 at 08:09 AM
This is a great feature, perhaps a simple rating system like an "X" needs to be in place on the videos and the more that are "preferred" by iLike users are the ones that remain on iLike and the ones that show up towards the front of the stack. The reason I suggest this is because I noticed some cases where spoofs are made, or where the video quality is terrible, or where it's simply a bad cover of a particular song. Let the iLike users choose!
Posted by: Deron Dantzler | November 08, 2006 at 12:14 PM
The youtube integration is pretty neat - especially since it was a 72 hour turn around time - I envy your nimbleness. I'm interested too in what (if any) reaction you get from YouTube/Google - do you think they will object to your embedding of videos in a commercial web site? I imagine given their business model they won't really care.
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Posted by: video videos | July 09, 2007 at 12:38 PM
It's actually pretty damn neat because I'm able to post stuff which I can't post from YouTube directly (ones which give a "video no longer available" message.) If this isn't a deal with Google, how long do you expect they will allow you to do it?
Posted by: Wade | November 17, 2008 at 01:28 PM