Imagine: you’ve found the next hit video on the web. Having just laughed yourself to tears, you regain your composure long enough to send a link of the video to your best friend, expecting to be praised for your extraordinary sense of humor. Then you wait. Five minutes go by, and still nothing. Did they like it? Did they even watch it? Finally, your efforts are rewarded with a hollow “LOL”.

It’s happened to all of us. The internet does a great job when it comes to sharing media, but it removes the human element from the viewing experience.

Oortle is trying to change that. In late 2007 they launched a webapp called Photophlow, currently in private beta, which at its core is a group chat centered around photographs (though it includes a number of other features as well). Users can browse through a Flickr photo album, and everyone will see the same thing at the same time, allowing for real-time reactions and discussion.

Now, they’re taking the next step with Videophlow, which takes the same dynamic community experience and applies it to YouTube. Groups of friends watch the same videos simultaneously as they interact with chat, emoticons, and gestures – viewers can even throw virtual tomatoes at the screen, complete with an animated splat.

All users will see the same portion of a video at the same time, even if they skip to a different scene. And best of all, groups can seamlessly transition to new videos. This has the chance to be a big hit – I can easily imagine groups of friends swapping (and watching) their favorite videos during late night viewing marathons.

Oortle is showing Videophlow to the public for the first time this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Launchpad, and will be opening in private beta in two weeks. We’ll let you know when that happens, and will have at least 100 invites to give out when the time comes.

We should note that a very similar application is available from SeeToo, which allows for simultaneous viewing of video content from a user’s computer rather than YouTube.

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I guess it’s Yossi Vardi Startup Day here at TechCrunch. The prolific Israeli investor behind ICQ is now backing a video chat service called SeeToo that was founded in January, 2007. SeeToo closed an angel round of about $1 million a month ago, and Vardi is the biggest investor, as well as an active board member. The NYC-Israeli startup quietly launched a private beta last week, and we have 500 invites for the first TechCrunch readers to sign up.

The basic concept behind SeeToo is a shared chat room where you can watch a video simultaneously with the person you are chatting with. This is intended for personal videos of your child or travels, rather than for Hollywood movies to watch together with a friend, although that would be technically possible as well. Yoav Ilan, head of marketing and biz dev, took me through a live demo earlier today. He showed me a video of his 7-month-old baby and one of a big yacht he videotaped from his apartment in New York. As the video was playing, we were typing away underneath in a chat box. I didn’t have to download anything. I just clicked on a Website link he e-mailed me, and it worked.

SeeToo is not alone in combining video and chat in this way. PalTalk allows simultaneous shared viewing of a video in a chat room with a lot more people than SeeToo currently supports (which is only two parties, for now, but that may change). And you can do something similar with Meebo Rooms, which lets you watch YouTube and other embeddable videos with a bunch of friends.

SeeToo could easily add more people to a chat, and is looking into it. But the main difference is SeeToo’s clever use of peer-to-peer technology. You never upload a video. Instead, if you want to share a video, you download a small 600 kilobyte app that takes any video on your desktop, compresses it, and streams it right from your computer to the SeeToo Web page that is hosting the chat. The application is currently only available for Windows, but a Mac version is due out next year.

When the chat is over, the video disappears from the Web (it remains on your computer). The yacht video, for instance, was a 120 MB file. SeeToo does not need to host or store any videos, and consumers don’t need to wait for the videos to upload before they can share them. The simplicity of the service is the best thing going for it.

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