For now, Twitvid's frontpage interface looks more like Digg's (before the social newsrooms). It shows most popular TwitVids by views, along with a featured Twitvid and a Twitvid Tuesdays Winner. There is a list of popular members on the right rail. Twitvid is tossing this simplistic design for user profiles that focus on personalized video taste. Sharing will be more focused around personal interests rather than top rated content. Imagine the Facebook news feed, but only populated by video that has been personalized to your tastes.

Twitvid will also feature channels organized around specific interests.

Twitvid has seen its user base grow 100% since last year. Currently there are more than 12 million unique visitors. Twitvid launched in May 2009. We first wrote about it in July 2009, back when it was a a brand new iPhone app for uploading video to Twitter.

Adding video feels like a natural move for SlideShare. After all, more and more business content is already moving towards video and adding video adds an extra dimension to a presentation that a basic set of PowerPoint slides simply can't convey. As SlideShare's CEO Ramshi Sinha told us earlier this week, the company is mostly targeting marketers, teachers, doctors and other professionals with this new service. Currently, there are only a handful of dedicated video sharing services for professionals and platforms like YouTube don't really lend themselves for targeting the audience that many of SlideShare's users are trying to reach.

The video pages look almost exactly like regular SlideShare pages. The only real difference is that these pages now display a video instead of basic PowerPoint or Keynote slides. SlideShare uses can embed these videos on their own sites.

The closest competitor to SlideShare's new offering is probably BrainShark's free MyBrainshark service, which also allows professionals to sell their presentations. SlideShare's big advantage, however, is that is already has a large user base. Indeed, as Sinha told us today, the service now reaches close to 30 million unique visitors per month (including sites that embed SlideShare content).

Upload Limit: 500 Megabytes per Video

For now, SlideShare is officially calling this new video service a beta product. The company plans to gather feedback over the next two to three month and then iterate on the current version. The upload limit is currently 500 megabytes and uses can upload up to 5 videos per month.

Interestingly, Disney-owned ABC.com, which just struck a deal to syndicate its videos on Hulu, saw the largest decline in streams since March, with a 15.9% drop in total streams.

Given that few of us here at RWW fall into MTV's demographic, we are just as puzzled as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD about the rapid growth of MTV's streaming video business. MTV grew faster than any other of its competitors among the Top 10 online video streaming sites. While MTV just launched its streaming video service in Japan, Nielsen's data is for the U.S. only. Looking at MTV's site though, there can be no doubt that MTV has made streaming video the center of its online strategy - and apparently this strategy is paying off.

Older Users Drive Hulu's Growth

On Hulu, according to Nielsen, the time users spent on the service increased by 119% since last November, mostly driven by the impressive growth that Hulu saw among users between 35 and 49. These users now make up 30% of Hulu's viewership and they spend far more time on Hulu than most other demographics (416 minutes per month - 10% more than any other group).

Although HTML emails aren't anything new, and can easily contain the code to an embedded video player, Goodmail's system is tuned toward the needs of larger customers who would like to bring something extra to their opt-in email campaigns. Their video platform is, by their description, very flexible in relation to which player can be used, how long the video clips are, and how the player is styled. Plus, detailed campaign statistics are available on the player, such as how many people watched the video. Similar statistics are available on the email portion of the campaign as well.

Another email video effort that has been in the works, initially geared more toward individual use, is MotionNotes by Whiteboard Labs. Their platform allows customers to compose video messages or choose YouTube videos, customized with a theme, and then send them to their friends. Although they offer a free account to individuals, they also offer a vertical Pro version that is designed with campaigns in mind.

Some video producers have found innovative ways of using YouTube's annotations feature, but often, they are only a distraction, and a lot of videos are simply better without them. Interestingly, YouTube acknowledged this in its announcement today and YouTube makes it pretty easy to turn annotations off altogether. Just go to your 'Account Settings' and look for the Annotations settings (obviously, you have to be logged in to YouTube for this to work).

Features

'Moments,' as thisMoment calls your updates, appear in a side-scrolling slideshow at the bottom of the screen. They can include multiple photos and videos, which you can import from Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and YouTube. You can also upload pictures and videos directly to thisMoment.

The central element for browsing thisMoment is the timeline, which consists of a series of bars at the top of the page. You can assign a specific importance to different 'moments', which is then represented by the height of the bar in your timeline. Different types of events also come with different colors. This is a surprisingly elegant way of browsing through individual timelines, but it also makes finding specific events relatively hard, has the timelines don't actually have dates on them.

As you would expect from a social site, you can follow other users, and send messages to your friends and family members on the service.

Geared Towards the Mainstream

ThisMoment is clearly geared towards a mainstream audience. It does have the ability to send updates to your Twitter account, but there are no embeddable widgets or other export functions for your photos or videos. For the most parts, thisMoment is a closed off silo. There is also no way to send images or videos to it from outside of the service. You can't email a picture to thisMoment, for example, and have it appear in your timeline.

Verdict: Pretty, Fun, But Limited

Most users won't mind (and may even appreciate) that the service lives in a walled garden. The site is definitely a great place for sharing updates about your kids or your travels, and thisMoment's user interface is very pretty, though sometimes to the detriment of its functionality. Why, for example, is the actual content relegated to the bottom half of the screen, even when browsing through the photos and videos of an event?

Advanced users will probably want more functionality than thisMoment currently offers. We would like to see RSS feeds from thisMoment, for example, so that we could broadcast our updates to FriendFeed or other services besides Twitter.