Video sharing site MetaCafe launched a new area of their site today – it uses the Digg API to show the most popular MetaCafe videos.
Viewers can sort by most dugg, highest rated, most discussed, most viewed, etc. Only Metacafe videos are shown.
Digg’s video channel and Metacafe overlap somewhat, particularly for people who just want to quickly find and browse interesting videos. That makes this pairing somewhat unlikely – I would have expected Metacafe to simply build their own Digg-like voting system or use Pligg’s open source software (see VideoSift’s similar functionality, which was recently in the news). The fact that they are working with Digg shows that they are willing to hitch their brand to that shooting star, damn the competitive angle.
Metacafe released a press release this afternoon on the new functionality. Notably absent from the release was Digg, who did not jointly release it, or provide a quote. (Update – see comment #2 below).
smart move by metacafe, I would say!
You might want to edit that last sentence… Digg is featuring a blurb about Metacafe using the API for this. It’s on the right side of the page, below the top 10 stories.
http://www.digg.com/
david – good point. updated.
Digg-like approach becoming more frequent amongst Web 2.0 sites. Best of luck to the meta!
That’s a nice feature.
Great way of integrating a site using the Digg API … will give them alot more traffic!
Darin
Thats a pretty genius idea actually. Watch you will see about 10,000 more copycats try and duplicate it.
Sexy Commercials
#7 – In order to copycat that idea, you need to have a substantial amount of content being submitted and dugg at Digg. And while one could come up with about a hundred or so sites that fit that profile, it can hardly reach 10,000.
Good move by Metacafe IMO. Better to build partnership rather than build everything. Of course the second option will always be open.
I prefer Motiono.Com over other sites because motiono is video specific and there is much more oversight.