Staff Blog

Hope everyone is having a wonderful Fourth of July weekend! (and for those of you abroad, just a nice weekend in general)

In honor of our nation's independence day, I propose a weekend project in which you show what democracy means to you. Talk about it, represent it visually, make an interpretive dance about it, whatever you want.

Things you must include in the video:
-your voice
-your nation's flag
-a camera

As always, only post videos that you've made specifically for this project or it doesn't count! And don't worry if you don't get it done by the end of the weekend, just post it when its done.

add your video to the Weekend Project group.

Have fun and be creative.

Since Vimeo is all about your contacts and seeing videos that matter to you, we are always looking into ways which will help you find and become connected with people you already know on Vimeo.

Making use of the Gmail and Yahoo data API's, you can now securely authenticate yourself with either service and grant Vimeo access to your address book/contacts. From there you can see which of your Gmail or Yahoo contacts are currently on Vimeo and which of them are currently your Vimeo contact or not.

This will make it very easy for you to find your friends and family on Vimeo and quickly add them as your contact.

You can give this a try by going to the Tools menu at the top and selecting Import Contacts or go to this URL:

http://www.vimeo.com/contacts/import

We hope this helps in finding new contacts and awesome videos!

The search function on Vimeo has always been an area where we knew there could be major improvement. Well I'm glad to say that major improvement has been made. We have pretty much replaced the entire search engine, and it is now much more accurate. It also now supports search functions like + and -, so if you wanted to search for videos of the beach, but you don't want to see any volleyball, you could do: beach -volleyball. You can also search for phrases in quotes, like "best video ever". Cool, right?

You know what else is cool? Yesterday we broke 1,000,000 plays in one day on Vimeo. That's a big milestone for us! At it's peak that's 17 people hitting play every second. This time last year, we peaked at 190k plays in one day. In January this year, we were at just 220k. After a long hibernation, Vimeo has quadrupled in size in pretty much every dimension in less than six months.

Oh, we also set personal bests for videos uploaded, HD videos uploaded, videos encoded, sign ups, logged in users, comments, and likes. On any given day we usually break one of these, to smash them all at once is awesome.

It brings me great pleasure to announce the final details of Vimeo's first-ever Meetup. We've been planning this event for months, and its only days away. We are very excited to see the many friendly faces that we've begun to know and love over the years, and I can think of nothing better than a gathering of such inspired, lovely people from our community.

The event is shaping up to be a good one with interactive art and video installations by fellow Vimeo artists, Vimeo screenings, and what will sure to be an amazing audio/visual performance by video DJs the Eclectic Method.

Here are the details:

Party Time: Friday, June 27th 7:00pm-11:00pm
Doors will be open from 7:00pm-9:00pm ONLY so please come early.

The Spot: CH Studio - Williamsburg, Brooklyn - South 1st and Kent Avenue. Take the L train to the Bedford stop and it is about a 10 minute walk from there.

Why you should come: Because it will be awesome.

Important: You MUST RSVP in order to attend the event. Please do so in the Are you coming? forum in the Vimeo Meetup Group. Please post your full name and any family members that may be coming with you.

See you then!

Love,

Vimeo

Today we're rolling out a big new feature: Vimeo Groups.

So, what's a group? It's a way for mini-communities to share videos within Vimeo. Groups makes it easy to get a bunch of contributors together and upload directly into a group, then have conversations entirely contained within that group. You can add forums, share calendars, photos, and even music with members of the group. And, most importantly, we've added six really killer themes so you can take customization to a whole new level.

Looking for an example? Check out Vimeo Meetup, New York, Knitting, or I Like Baseball!

Some of you might have noticed Groups shares a lot of functionality with Channels. The best way to differentiate the two is that Groups is for lots of people to collaborate and contribute and Channels is for individuals to showcase a bunch of videos the way they want. If you think your Channel is better suited as a Group you can convert it to a Group by going to your Channels settings page, but be warned, there is no going back! In the coming months we'll be building Channels 2.0, which is going to remove some features better suited for Groups (like forums and calendar) and add some Channels-only features, like tools to change the order and display style of videos.

We've been working on Groups for several months, we hope you like it! Special thanks to Iowa, Jack, Sox, Sean, Jake and all our beta testers for making it so smooth and pretty.

Now get grouping!

About a year ago, Si proposed a project called Glass Shouting. The project consists of this: put a glass up to your mouth, and shout as loud as you can into it.

See his example here

Victoria thought it would be a fun Weekend Project and I couldn't agree with her more. So find a good glass, give a good shout, and record it! Then post the links to the videos here.

Have fun and be creative.

The Vimeo Staff has decided to put development on pause this week and work on fixing some of the pesky bugs on the site.

During this time, things may go a little strange for short periods of time, but we are keeping a close eye on it and will try to keep everything running as smoothly as possible.

A few weeks ago, I posted a homework assignment for anyone who was interested. I realize that the word "homework" may bring up years of suppressed grade school anxiety, when in fact it should feel more like "fun time".

So, lets just call it the "Weekend Project", and anyone who is interested should give it a try. Then post the link in this thread. Try making a new piece, not just posting something you've already done.

Weekend Project: Edit a video that has a musical rhythm with both sounds and visuals.

Have fun and be creative.