Santa Monica-based TagWorld, a MySpace competitor, launched an admirable music product last month. Tomorrow they launch video and an upgraded upload client (the uploader is PC only for now).
As an aside, TagWorld claims half a million member registrations (launch was in November 2005). This is far short of MySpace’s 50ish million, of course, but it is impressive growth.
Video
Tagworld is taking a decentralized approach to video. Users may upload video in just about any format directly to their TagWorld storage (all users are given a gb of storage to use for video, music and any other type of file). Alternatively, videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites can be “bookmarked” directly into the My Videos area, and/or directly into the user’s TagWorld page for streaming to visitors.
I have not seen a solution that offers both uploading and bookmarking functionality, allowing users to choose to upload or just point to another site for video. This seems like an evolutionary step forward to me.
File Uploader
Since TagWorld is also operating a virtual storage service as well by giving users a gb of free storage, they’ve developed a client based uploader tool to handle large files and folders. TagWorld automatically detects if a file is music/audio, video, or another type of file and categorizes it approriately. If a user uploads a folder containing a video, and song and a word document, those files are places in My Music, My Video and My Files, accordingly. Again, I’ve not seen this on any other service. A mac client is in development.
The Uploader is live now, Video goes live tomorrow morning around 9 am.