next*

In the summer of 2006, I was fortunate enough to watch the World Cup final in Dolores Park right here in San Francisco. For those of you not familiar with the park, it's nestled in the heights of the Mission district; a gentle slope gives you a spanning view of downtown. At the foot of the park, a giant crane held a big TV screen. I was struck by the thousands of people who showed up to watch the game together with their friends. Check it out to the right here. It was packed.

I thought it a shame that you couldn't do this online. There was no way to get a far away friend and watch a video together online. And so myself and some others at the Berkeley lab built a little research prototype called Zync which allows you to share videos in sync with a friend through Yahoo! Messenger (if you're running Windows).

On our blog, we posted about Zync and we pushed it to the Yahoo! Messenger Plugin Gallery. We smiled when we had 50 users. And cheered at 100. And then at 250 you could hear us roaring. It kept growing and growing.

After six months, we had over 3000 users who opted-in for our research study. This was a great success. And so we began examining how people share videos in sync. In our studies, we found people liked synchronized sharing because it made them feel closer and more connected with their friends and family. You can read some of the studies that were published at ACM Multimedia and DUX.

As proud parents of our little prototype, we're happy to announce that Zync has grown up and is now a featured plug-in in the new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9.0. If you're running the Messenger beta, just send a video URL to your friend. If Zync knows how to play it, you'll see a button that says "Watch With Me" (pictured here to the right). Click it and Zync will load up in your (and in your friend's) conversation window and the video will start playing automatically.

We couldn't be happier. I'd personally like to give a good shout to everyone on the Zync Team and John D. at Yahoo! Messenger for all their hard work in helping Zync graduate.

Oh, and if you're not ready to try out the beta just yet (read: you're still running Yahoo! Messenger 8.1), you can still install Zync from the Plugin Gallery. :)

Popularity: 7% [?]