Tonight we're saying good-bye to metadata labs and hello to Podly.tv

Podly.tv was originally planned as one of two products from metadata labs.  As time went on it became clear it is our small startup's very best chance for success and we decided to give it our undivided effort. The analytics tool, Buzz Cruncher, has been set aside for the time being (though we hope to return to it in the future.)

With our new direction comes a new name.  We are now Podly.tv!  Nothing else has changed.  We're the same four guys and the same cat.  Our blog will carry on at blog.podly.tv.  See you there!

Our goal should not be to design interfaces that can be understood. Our goal should be to design interfaces that can't be misunderstood.

A hundred years ago Henry Ford introduced the Model T and took us from early-adopter horseless carriages into the modern mass-market automobile era.

Web video feels a lot like that right now and today's equivalent for the Model T would have to be YouTube.  We are constantly impressed by how much it's growing.

Here are some stats from our web crawler:

600 million media urls (and adding more than a million every day)

3.3 billion web pages link or embed media

41 million content authors have created media

600 times a second we find a link or embed to a known media url

13 times a second we find a new media url

1 time a second we find a new content author

This all looks pretty incredible but it's really just getting started.  When HTML5 video comes along and every mobile phone you can buy includes a video camera it will make today's video growth seem quaint by comparison.

We're not hosting media it so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison but Metadata Labs is finding more than 40 hours of media every minute on the web. YouTube is a big chunk of that.

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/oops-pow-surprise24-hours-of-video...

Podly has been delayed until April. Our testers told us what we needed (if not wanted) to hear. The product is usable and functions but the interface design is earning less-than-rave reviews like "boring", "feels too much like work", and "should be more like TV." We're grateful for your honest feedback. There is no quick fix for the current design so we're scrapping it and starting over (not the entire product-- just the interface design.) It will set us back a few months. We're very encouraged by what we see in our first prototype of the next interface and we hope you'll agree it's worth the delay.