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Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

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SAN FRANCISCO--The company behind Photophlow, a site that presents a lively chat room interface around the Flickr photo-sharing site, plans to demonstrate on Thursday a similarly elaborate presentation of Google's YouTube video service.

Start-up Oortle's service, called Videophlow, lets people post videos into a chat room and lets those in the room control the video playback. And as with Photophlow, people can use Videophlow to take advantage of YouTube features such as searching, adding comments, or marking videos as favorites.

"You'll even be able to throw a tomato at the screen for everyone to see," Neil Berkman, founder of Oortle, said in an interview at the Web 2.0 Expo here, where he is scheduled to demonstrate the technology.

While Videophlow is still undergoing closed testing, Photophlow has been groaning under the weight of its membership, with slow response times and sometimes no access at all.

"Scaling and bug fixing are still our biggest priorities," Berkman said. "Supporting real-time interaction in the way we do means we can't use off-the-shelf software. It's a hard thing to get right, but I'm sure we will."

Streaming videos are tougher than photos for servers to handle, but happily for Oortle, that burden falls on YouTube operator Google. It's no more difficult to build its framework around video than around photo, Berkman said.

Another difference between the earlier site is that Videophlow will have "less emphasis on big public rooms. The main use we'd like to support is small groups of friends watching together," he said.

As with Photophlow, Videophlow is expected to be offered through a private beta test version.

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So you've been having fun with Facebook's somewhat half-baked chat service for the last day now, but are you growing tired of having to first log-in, then pop-out the chat window? For those of you who want to chat without this two-step process there's a nice little tweak discovered by Mozilla Links that lets you set Facebook chat to pop out in Firefox's side bar.

I'm not really a fan of sidebar driven apps (gDocsBar not included), but this implementation works out pretty well. It will load up your buddy list and work just like the pop-out version does--minus of course the actual pop-up.

I'm still waiting for Facebook to add away and invisible modes and for other chat apps to be able to integrate it like Pidgin, Meebo and Trillian. In the meantime, this tweak makes it a little more bearable.

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