What we thought might have been an AIR app in the making, may be something entirely different. With social video sharing sites such as Youtube and Vimeo it can be hard to keep the recommendations flowing. Hundreds of videos are added to these sites daily, but only a select few are really worth our time. With no easy way to sort through these uploads, Vimeo is asking the community for help in finding a solution. Today the site has announced the launch of Vimeo Toys. These toys aims to give users an interactive and visually appealing way to find more video content. Here's a look at what's available.]]>
VimeoLand & Pulse
The VimeoLand toy gives a look at recent happenings on Vimeo. VimeoLand displays an interactive landscape of characters that represent the latest actions from Vimeo users. Hovering your mouse over a character will display a pop-up containing one of the following recent actions:
- A comment
- A like
- Recent signup
- Recent upload
Each action includes a link to the profile of the user who completed the action and a link to the video that the action took place on. What's a little random and unique about VimeoLand is an airplane that flies back and forth above the landscape. Clicking the plane will cause a random video to be dropped from the plane's cargo. It's pretty nifty. Vimeo fans will find this particular toy to be very useful and entertaining.
Currently there's only one other toy available. If you're looking for something less flashy than VimeoLand, we recommend Pulse.
Making Your Own Vimeo Toy
We're interested in seeing what other unique visuals developers will create with Vimeo Toys. To help developers get started, Vimeo has listed a sample XML file with over 50 activity items to choose from. Vimeo's team of workers will decide whether or not your toy is worth being featured on Vimeo. While this isn't a problem for us, we'd rather see the community take a vote on what stays and what goes.
What we think would be really interesting to see is for Vimeo and developers to take things to the next level. By this we mean seeing a visual graph of what our friends, or a select group of users, are up as a Vimeo Toy. The current offerings are still a little too random for our tastes. Nevertheless, we're happy with what we see so far and look forward to see what else is next.