iPad Applications can be broken into two categories: those that port a particular browsing or reading experience from the Web (or from a smartphone) to the tablet, and those that completely re-invent what it means to interact with digital content. Flipboard may be the premier example as an app that changed the way in which we read our feeds, our blogs, our tweets.
So add to the list of apps that “change everything” ShowYou, a video application that may just well change the way in which you interact with video content.
The comparison to Flipboard is pretty apt here, because ShowYou takes the video content from all your friends and social networks and presents them in one place but in an entirely new way. This isn’t a feed, and this isn’t a chronological presentation of videos.
When you sign up for ShowYou, you can link your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as your Vodpod account – the video sharing company from which ShowYou was born. And via the completely immersive and interactive ShowYou interface, you can scroll and scan and move through shared videos from YouTube, Vimeo and TED. I use the verb “scroll” here very loosely, because this isn’t at all about a linear list or links to videos, but rather a new way to move through video feeds.
It’s based, in part, on what your network of friends are sharing. And ShowYou provides a new way for you and your friends to comment and interact with each others’ video shares.
ShowYou also works with Apple’s Airplay, so that you can play these videos on your TV, providing of course you have an Apple TV 2.0
The link to a television screen is important here, because as much as we’ve heard about the iPad (and YouTube) providing “lean-back” video consumption – that is, something you can kick back and watch truly at leisure – the technology really hasn’t been there. But to be able to project your videos to the TV and to be able to move through them as you can via the ShowYou interface, it does feel as though we’ve moved to a brand new way to watch and share online video.
