Online social networking sites are excellent for communicating with friends (like on Facebook), having conversations and sharing media with people who are interested in the same things you are (like on Twitter), and connecting with professionals in your industry (like on LinkedIn).

Traditional social networks have many great benefits to offer, but for the most part don’t focus on offering exciting opportunities such as team building to achieve common collaborative goals. I believe that the next evolution in social networking is to empower individuals to accomplish tasks and projects, and to reward the deserving individuals for the content that gets created as a result.

So another way to think of Spidvid is as a social network with the purpose of allowing individuals to form teams, collaborate to create and produce quality video content, and credit those who invest their time and talent into the content.

Jeremy Campbell Illustrations collaborative team, connecting, ecosystem, empowering, new media model, next-gen media, online video, production teams, social movement, video creation, web 2.0, web video

So the hacker recovery has been pretty much taken care of now, so we can proceed to continue to build the Web’s first ever social platform for the collaborative video production community.

What we are working on right now:

- a redesign for this blog to match the look of our site.

- creating a video which outlines what Spidvid is all about, how to use the site, how to benefit, etc.

- redesigning our homepage to include the video, and to better articulate what Spidvid is used for.

- making some minor design and functionality tweaks to improve the overall user experience.

- building the list of individuals who want to be part of our private beta.

We are on a mission to not only pioneer this space, but to be the #1 long-term winner in it as well. We expect to have competitors within a few months so we’re hard at work to continually innovate our offering for our production community.

Jeremy Campbell News advantages, benefits, community, design, features, new design, new video, pioneer, user experience, what is next

Our developers have been in restore mode for this entire week as we encountered a fairly bad hacker attack last weekend.

We expect all functionality to be back to normal by early next week, and will resume our marketing and promotional activities at that time.

For all of the people who signed up for an invite to our private beta, we are sad to announce that we lost all of the email addresses in the database. So you will you need to visit our site, click “Sign Up”, and provide your email once again. We’re very sorry that this happened, and are making the necessary adjustments to reduce the risks for future attacks.

We are very much looking forward to all of the good times that lie ahead for Spidvid, and for the early community which joins our social movement.

Jeremy Campbell News hacked, private beta, recovery, restoration, security, sorry

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been outlining Spidvid’s media model, and how the video creation and production community can benefit from leveraging it. Today I want to discuss where the content is uploaded and distributed to.

Spidvid remains in private beta so testing is being done with our parent company’s video sharing website UnleashVideo.com. As we move further into our beta we will be developing partnerships to broaden our distribution, analytics, and monetization ecosystem.

It’s still very early on so Web distribution is our key focus initially, but as the community and content network grows we will be working to expand beyond the Web to mobile, and broadband TV. Wherever the viewing audience seeks out videos, our community’s content will be readily available to consume.

Our goal is that by late this year our site will move from a private beta to a public beta, opening the door to many more exciting opportunities for our members, and the quality video content that they create.

Jeremy Campbell News distribution, empowering, new media, online video, video creation, video projects

We have already got a few early reviews of Spidvid, most notably from KillerStartups.com. There are plans to send out a media press release in the next couple of weeks, but before that happens I want to articulate to the best of my ability what Spidvid doesn’t and isn’t doing.

Spidvid isn’t a freelancing site

When people see the word “projects” on our site they may think that there are contractors providing services, and company’s buying those services. Example: Guru.

There is no money exchanged between individuals on Spidvid. What happens is a video creator submits a project, seeks bids from individuals, forms a team, completes the project to produce a video, and everyone on the team gets credit and compensation according to the video’s success from distribution to the viewing audience.

Spidvid doesn’t have real-time collaboration tools

There are a few sites out there where you purchase a paid membership so you can collaborate on script writing, the editing process, and communicate in real-time on a specific project. Example: Market7.

Spidvid doesn’t provide these “hardcore” tools, but instead provides the social framework so that individuals can connect, team up on video projects, distribute content as a team, and be rewarded as individuals. Some people have called Spidvid a new sort of “Hollyweb” (Hollywood + web = Hollyweb), and also refer to it as being a platform for forming your own on-demand video entertainment studios.

Whatever helps someone best understand what Spidvid is all about is totally fine with us. I guess our site could be almost compared to Twitter in that sense as everyone seems to have their own perspective of what the micro-blog site actually is.

Hopefully this clears up some of the confusion we’re getting on how Spidvid compares to existing site’s out there. As far as we know there is nothing like Spidvid out there on the web today.

Jeremy Campbell News collaboration, connecting, killer startup, new media, no freelancing, video projects