YC Startup Justin.tv hits Alexa 160

Ruby engineers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=312684 Python engineers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=312675

I thought justin.tv was this site that tracked a guy named Justin 24/7. I seemed to recall him having a camera crew with him all the time, and that was the shtick. I had heard about them from the early days of this group, and I think had read about the camera crew and such on some web site.

So when I saw this post, I read through the comments and was confused about the "stop worrying about copyright law" statement.

I decided to check it out.

Now, looking at the front page, it seemed like either I was completely mistaking justin.tv for another web site, or it has changed it's goals, or the 'follow justin around' was a publicity ploy to get attention, and that indeed could be one of the 'channels' I see on the front page ("create your own channel"). (if the latter is actually correct, kudos to a great ploy as the name stood out to me)

Either way, I still didn't really 'get it' from the front page. It looked cool, and I was able to surmise what was going on from all the activity (there was a video of someone playing doom) that it was about video sharing.

I finally found the 'about us' section which turns out to be brief bio's of the founders and key employees. And there was a guy named Justin who looked like he might have been the guy who had the 24 hour camera crew with him. But his Bio didn't refer to this.

So perhaps I was imagining the whole thing. That's cool. I've done it before.

But if not, and the 'follow justin' thing really happened, then at least mention it somewhere so a out of touch lad like me doesn't check himself in somewhere.

But I still don't know what makes justin.tv special. It's description is "Justin.tv is the leader in live video and the place to broadcast and share video online." I thought that's what youtube was.

So it justin.tv the more hip version of youtube? Or, as I think about this more, is it the word LIVE that separates it from youtube? Are all the feeds 'live'? Like in real time? If so, that should get a bit more attention than some text at the bottom of the page.

And so as I review the front page, indeed it looks as though the video on the top could be live.

And the video on the bottom are highlights. Aha. Previous recordings.

Ok. Now I get it. That's pretty cool. How about we rewrite the description to be "Justin.tv streams LIVE video.".

But seriously, it took me a while. Live streams should have an icon in the bottom right that say "LIVE!" that doesn't get into the recording.

The concept of 'time' should be more involved in the navigation + searching. The front page should be like TV guide, and I can click on a row, at the 'current time', and see a live recording of that channel. As it plays the TV guide scrolls to the left slowly to mark the passing of time. The length of a show is depicted with width, and I can click anywhere to see the past. And since it's realtime let me sort the channel rows by poularity, ratings etc.

Sorry to be out of it. I'm a little surprised it took me so long to get the 'live' part.

It looks like traffic really started to pick up around March. Did anything drastic happen around then?