Show HN: I taught myself PHP and built TweetPerView.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I taught myself PHP and built TweetPerView.com

tweetperview.com

44 pointsjordanlyall53 comments

The fundamental problem here is that I don't know if I want to tweet about a video before I watch it. A tweet is like an endorsement, especially when you have the extreme burden of more than 10 twitter followers (as I have) - you have a responsibility to your adoring public to ensure you fill your stream with high quality, relevant content.

All jest aside, I think it's a great idea to have the ability to tweet during a video as a seamless experience.

You've chosen a great example with Mixergy. Andrew's interviews are LOOONG and I'm frightfully busy. I love watching his videos but I rarely make it through to the end. If I have a tab open with hootsuite in it I'll quite often hop across and tweet that I just watched the video, if the video were totally awesome I'd open up a tab to get to hootsuite and tweet about it but if it's nice and interesting but not bone shatteringly good, no-one but me and Wistia's video hosting stats will know that I watched it.

If, however, the "Are you enjoying this video? Click to tweet about it right now" came up during the first half of a video, I'd be far more likely to spread the word about what I'm watching more often. Obviously it would have to be less obtrusive than it is now and it shouldn't interrupt the flow of the video at all.

Nobody complains about referring friends as a way to ascend pre-release invite lists (i.e. http://www.socialcam.com/). How is this any different?

The artificial scarcity on beta apps is understood but unavoidable, if that's the route the app makers are going.

Telling me to bother my friends before I can watch a video that I can get w/ a quick Google search or view-source is another matter.

(That said, nice little script you made. Pretty clever!)

Actually I find that practice kind of pernicious. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Agreed. If I was forced, or even prompted, to tweet before watching a video, there's a very strong chance I'd just close the damn tab. Don't force me to promote your content before I have a good reason to.

Seamless tweeting mid-video seems pretty useful, though!

It only took me a minute or two to write a javascript bookmark (i.e., paste this in as browser URL) that will bypass the tweet requirement:

        javascript:a=window.frames[0].document.getElementById('bg').src.split('/');a.pop();window.location.href='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v='+a.pop();

It's only been tested for the OP's site (and will only work for his particular page structure) but the point is that it could easily be adapted for any one of these.

The OP should seriously reconsider how useful such a technology really is if you've really figured out a workaround to eliminate it 2 hours after launch.

I think the bottom line is, if it's something of interest, a tweet is a small price to pay. If it's not worth it, you'll move on. The hope is that the viral growth makes up for the drop-off. We shall see.

But... how do I know it's worth the "price" before I've seen it? Or am I missing something?

If it's coming from a source you trust.

But I know that the "source I trust" hasn't watched the video yet, because they can't have, because they are forced to tweet about it before they have seen it.

I completely agree and would add one more point:

You may get tweeted by doing this but you might not like the tweets. I'd think a better solution would be to let the user tweet part-way or at the end of the video (but of course this may be harder). It's certainly easy to do where you control the player, but that's obviously not the case with YouTube.

This is a clever idea, it is however very horrible for users. I would close a page if this was requested of me, although you may have some luck with people in the "social media" field.

If I was running this site I would have it create a prompt at the end of the video that says "oh hey if you enjoyed this why not share on Twitter?" but I guess Youtube already supports that natively... sort of.

Not everything that asks something of users is bad for users. I think it's an awesome idea.

It's not asking something of a user, it's forcing them. If this was optional it would be asking. I think it would be great if it was optional and showed at the end of the video, why would you tweet about a video you've not yet seen?

Forcing users to do something isn't always necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the use case.

In general, no, I wouldn't want to tweet about a video before seeing it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a use inside of something larger.

I can't ever see a use case where it is OK to force a user to syndicate your content before viewing it. It trying to force virality -- and after a while users will stop watching videos, negating the effect if not harming the content in the long run. Think "Expert's Exchange"

Every time anything tries to make me like it, it has turned out to be a hoax (discovered by googling the thing not by liking it I might add).

Well nobody's forcing you to use his service to force users. So it's still all good!

Nice, I'd personally like to see an option to allow users to dismiss the dialog and not tweet but still see the video.

I can see some uses for forcing a tweet but also for not forcing it.

Well done for diving in and learning something new.

This is the perfect intersection between pretty crafty and annoying as hell.

It might be stronger if you could play the first 5 minutes and then prompt for the tweet to see the rest of the video.

Hi guys, thanks for the response and feedback so far.

A couple things:

* This puts the M in MVP. By rolling it live, I hope to prove (or disprove) the general concept.

* As I mentioned earlier, the next iteration will include an option for the video creator to add a 'dismiss' button to allow the viewer to bypass the tweet requirement and just play the video.

* The next thing I want to test is an 'in-stream' tweet requirement. Perhaps it shows 30-90 seconds of a video and then it prompts for a tweet.

* I'm working on other, less obtrusive social actions: FB like, follow, etc.

Thanks again for the feedback. Keep 'em coming. :)

What framework are you using for PHP?

No framework. Just hacking it all together. I'm a product/business guy who picked up PHP/MySQL and JSON to achieve a proof of concept. If there's a developer out there that wants to contribute, I'd be happy to chat.

As you continue your plunge into PHP, consider a super lightweight framework like CodeIgniter. Moving to a Model-View-Controller pattern early will turn you into a good developer a lot quicker.

I can understand some of the criticisms in this thread (and from a user experience point of view they're pretty valid), but I think using TweetPerView on your videos is more like saying "this video isn't free, but instead of paying money to watch it, you're paying a tweet's worth of social capital to watch it".

I mean, ignoring the fact that the video is on YouTube and all.

Exactly, perhaps I need to work on getting that point across. Think of it as an alternative to micropayments.

Also, the idea is that if the video creator wants to make it exclusively available as a TweetPerView, they should mark the video as 'private' so it won't show on YouTube.com and make it available to be embedded.

I have to laugh, because although I don't think I'd do this, most of my clients are pageview hungry media sites, and they would love this. I'd say within a month one of them will ask me if it's feasible to implement.

This reminds me in some ways of SolveMedia (the CAPTCHA that forces users to engage with advertisers). What if you forced someone to tweet a CAPTCHA (I'm commenting on this hot new video, check it out!) and then used the Twitter API to verify?

If I were ever forced to tweet about a video before I watched it, I would immediately close the tab and instead send a tweet about how idiotic the video poster is for making me jump through such a ridiculous hoop.

I'm not even sure how you'd take into account someone not actually having a Twitter account in the first place. I hear tell those people call themselves "normal".

Edit: almost forgot... if this "service" ever took off, the first thing I'd do is write a plugin to disable it.

And I might set up a separate Twitter called "ShittyVideos"

Haha just kidding, I think this is a cool idea/experiment, it'd be interesting to see what user reactions would be. Initially I would try to have a "dismiss" button just so you can see the ratio of users who tweeted vs. dismissed to see what kind of "annoyance index" you may be looking at here. Edit: ...what kind of "annoyance index" you may be looking at by disabling the dismiss button in the future

Definitely an interesting concept.

I don't comprehend why anyone would want to experience with seeing just how far they can annoy a user, on purpose. It's like poking some poor caged animal with a sharp stick. Are you annoyed yet? No? How about now... are you annoyed yet?

Sure, you could look at it like that, but this is what marketing is at it's core, really. You run a campaign and you then judge whether it was effective or not. And yeah, when some marketing effort isn't effective, it could be because it was annoying.

But, the bottom line is that marketing a product or service is the process of figuring out what works on real people and a really good way of figuring that out is by actually trying it out with a real audience and recording the results, like a real experiment. You can call it purposely annoying users, but I don't see it that way, and for all we know some people might like the option of tweeting about the video they're about to watch...

There's a CBC radio show called the Age of Persuasion that did an excellent show called "Breaking the Contract" [1] on this topic. What is the role of advertising? You are saying is essentially about being annoying; I say, bad advertising is about being annoying, and good advertising gives something back.

The idea of putting up some sort of "Tweet-wall" before I can watch a video and forcing me to tell everyone I'm watching said video is a bit like coercing a review from someone about material they have never seen. Never mind being incredibly annoying, it's also basically asking the user to lie. You can't have an opinion about something about which you know nothing.

And do the Twitter messages coming from this Tweet-wall really add value? To anything or anyone? To the user having to type the message, it's like they're being asked to generate spam for all their followers.

And does that forced Twitter spam actually benefit the video in the long run? Or does it cast a shadowy pall over the video, the video owner, the person forced to tweet, and ultimately, the technology itself?

I'm fascinated at how many in this thread see this as a good idea. I can't even fathom how someone would come to that conclusion.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/ageofpersuasion/episode/2009/02/14/season-...

"I say, bad advertising is about being annoying, and good advertising gives something back."

I totally agree with you here. All I was saying is that it would be interesting to see if this idea would work, that's all. One way to figure that out is by running the experiment and capturing the statistics

Wonderful that you did this all by your self. How long did it take? Other thing, I personally didnt like the "obligation" to tweet to see de video, one thing that would bem more interesting it is if you need to tweet to continue to watch the video. That guarantees that you are enjoying, and you want to share. Other thing, maybe some real time tweets would be very fun, like you write something little(100 characters) and than you have an update in tweeter.

The design is fantastic and I think you might be on to something here. Although there's the obvious problem (as seen from the comments) of users not being able to see what they endorse first, you will find ways to mitigate this.

Perhaps you let users tweet in the next X minutes of viewing; if they don't like it, they close the tab and there's no tweet.

In any case, good luck, and I look forward to seeing this work for you!

I ain't tweeting shit, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQtXHp5wXLE

I'm using that public video just as an example. As someone pointed out above, at its current state it's pretty easy to find out the url and watch the video. 1) It's a convenience thing, many of us download music on iTunes even though we can pirate the mp3s. 2) we can't assume the behavior of the average web user based on our own behaviors.

I'm glad you learned PHP, but frankly I don't see how this site actually adds value.

If someone likes your video, a simple call-to-action (preroll?) or a page element loading with a tweet box seems like it'd be more effective than an ultimatum.

Good design though, seems like you're on the right track for creating products. Good luck!

Oh, good, you do allow the user to edit the tweet before sending it off.

Nice job on the self learning part. Not sure about interrupting my video viewing experience. Maybe have that option at the end of the video or pop up subtly in the middle somewhere.

Holy crap. This. Looks. Stunning.

We need to talk.

Congrats on learning PHP and building something. But what about that HUGE percentage of users that don't have twitter accounts?

The Tweet should contain the "title" of the video rather than saying "this is a great video"

So you created something to annoy users. How is this good?

maybe you'd want to let people watch your video without having to tweet it. just a suggestion.

I think that's pretty much the raison d'être of this site, though.

That's next on the list. It's been the #1 request so far: a "just show me the video" link. Perhaps the publisher has an option of enabling in the setup process.

Perhaps you can have videos play a preview on accessing the site - allow the user to click the play button, have the video pause after ten seconds/5% of time, then pop up asking for a tweet if they want to continue watching.

it needs an [x] button in the corner

Very nice idea, but you should let users tweet in the middle of the video or at the end. If you force me to tweet before I won't watch it, but in the middle I will be very likely to.

That's probably true for most people if it's just a video in the middle of a blank page, but I would guess that you can pretty easily get people to tweet to watch the video if you a) put up a compelling description of the video or series and/or testimonials, or b) already have a dedicated following.

If Seth Godin or Ramit Sethi did this, I doubt they would have any trouble at all getting thousands of tweets on each video.

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