Lifecasting startup Your Truman Show will present a Video Map Widget at DEMO today, bringing their life story focused video product to social networking sites. VideoMap can be placed and accessed by anyone using Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, YourTrumanShow or other sites. Its selling point is a graphical video relationship map, which, according to YourTrumanShow’s Founder & Chairman Arturo Artom, “Lets you see who links to you and who you link to as well as the video content you have both collected and may wish to share. VideoMap let’s you go from topic to topic and from life to life.” See our previous coverage here. Aside from the clever name, Your Truman Show is trying to bring the traditional idea of a blog as an online journal to the lifecasting field. The chronological time line via the “V-Link” interface provides something different in an increasingly competitive vertical. → Read More
Your Truman Show launches Wednesday with a product dedicated to publishing, rating and reviewing personal video stories. The service is a combination of personal blogging, user-generated video and social networking, delivering users an intuitive interface than enables them to catalog their lives. The “V-link interface” with in Your Truman Show visually connects related storylines making it easy for users to find and follow stories as they develop over time. Usual user rating systems are also provided with higher rating videos gaining preference at key navigation points. My first question naturally was in relation to the name. Warner Bros didn’t renew their rights to exclusive use of The Truman Show, so now it makes up two thirds of a Web 2.0 startup. The platform feels a little bit like YouTube meets blogging. Yes, it is another video hosting platform ala YouTube but the layout is different. The focus is very much on blogging personal stories; with features include chronological submissions through to story books. The team behind Your Truman Show is aiming to extend life-on-camera into a network of “tomorrow’s online reality stars, migrating user-generated content from single videos to multi-episode series”. I have absolutely no idea whether they are actually going to achieve this, but it’s a well crafted, niche video hosting site that certainly won’t fail due to a lack of good presentation and coding. → Read More
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