I’ve begun to put my web application skills to work on some personal projects instead of client projects. Since I’m heavily into online video and the vlogging community I want to do something in that online space. I have a few ideas for some “value added” services that I could provide. My first online service is based on Tweet Clouds, a web site that generates tag clouds based on Twitter posts. Actually, I’ve had this idea for quite some time but was not motivated to implement it until I saw some online buzz for Twitter tag clouds.
I did some online research and could not find anyone offering to create tag clouds based on the tags that vloggers use for their videos. So I’ve created an ASP.NET 2.0 web application named YouCloud. YouCloud is a simple form that only requires you to enter a YouTube username. It will gather the video tags for every video by that user and generate a tag cloud. If you mouse over a word in the tag cloud you will see a tooltip showing how many videos were tagged with that word. If you click on the word you will be taken to YouTube and shown the search results for that keyword.
I don’t expect to win any awards with this simple web application but it should not tax my web hosting company’s web server. I don’t see why anyone would be terribly interested in this service unless they are curious about what tags a popular vlogger uses to promote his videos. Some vloggers try to cheat the system by using inaccurate tags.
I’ve placed a Google AdSense video unit and an Amazon Honor System donation button on YouCloud to see if I can generate any revenue. I suspect I can make more money doing billable client work than this entrepreneurial crap.
I can apply the same concept to generate tag clouds for other Web 2.0 sites like Flickr or LiveVideo. I do have another idea for a YouTube service. The next thing I will be working on is a back up utility which will generate an Excel spreadsheet of your Favorite Videos. This will be useful if YouTube deletes your account and you lose all your favorites.
Today I learned that Live Universe, the company that owns LiveVideo, has purchased Pageflakes, the mashup web site based on ASP.NET 2.0 technology. This is an interesting development because it could mean that LiveVideo may get some more mashup features to create the ultimate social networking web site.
