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Sharing videos made easy with Yahoo! Zync
By Benny Thomas
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Saturday, 12 September 2009, 03:01 IST
Bangalore: Imagine chatting with an online friend about a great video that is on the Internet and trying to describe the video to the best of your ability through the chat window, but it just doesn't work. Yahoo! Messenger's plug-in Zync is an ideal solution for such a scenario. The plug-in developed by the Yahoo! Research Group, lets a person watch a video with an online friend and discuss about it through the same window using Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 or later versions. The plug-in is also currently integrated with the Messenger 10.0, which was recently released by Yahoo!.
A plug-in for Yahoo! Messenger for Windows, Zync allows users to watch videos together. With Zync, users can watch a video, pause it at that right moment and chat about it with their friends. It has been created by David Ayman Shamma of the Internet Experiences Group, part of Economics and Social Systems at Yahoo! Research.
Yahoo! started this project at Yahoo! Research in Berkeley, a facility that explores and invents social media and mobile media technologies. Videos from Yahoo!, YouTube and Google, can be played in the browser between friends in sync, with the users, also having a control of the playback of the video and they can chat about it instantly. Zync and other similar plug-ins are developed by Yahoo! Research after studying the user behaviors. Further, Yahoo! Research will analyze the behavior of Zync users to develop newer applications.
It is estimated that around 24.7 percent of the world's population uses Internet, but the question stands at what all these people do with the information they collect? In a quest to find an answer for this, the Yahoo! Research team carries out several field studies, prototypes, activity log analysis, surveys and data mining. "With the growth of social networking sites and mobiles, the interaction of users with technology has become of prime importance and we at Yahoo! want to find how applications work in people's life," said Elizabeth F Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo!, in an exclusive with Siliconindia.
Elizabeth was in India recently and talked about Zync and other such widgets during the company's Big Thinker's conference. A psychologist by training, for the past 15 years, she has involved her self in studying people - especially how they adopt and adapt technologies into their everyday lives. According to Elizabeth, there are individual differences, cultural norms and human characteristics that determine the kind of application that needs to be designed. "Technology is part of our everyday landscape," she says. "We either connect with it and collaborate to get things done or don't. It is very interesting as well as challenging to understand what a user needs. An application might be handling multiple tasks for one but unless the user emotes with it, there is no use for the application in the user's life." As the head of research at Yahoo!'s Internet Experiences Group, it is quite challenging for Elizabeth and her team to understand the psyche of the users who use Yahoo's different services. Since the company has a global audience for itself, the greatest challenge is to design a product with such an interface that it easily attracts users across geographies, communities, gender and age group.
According to her, the number of people sharing their personal information online has been increasing, which prompts companies like Yahoo! to create applications to involve more interactions between users. "Some of the sites in which people post photos and videos can provide information on different cultures, which helps in learning those cultures and also parents teach their kids through this shared content," says Elizabeth on the use of content sharing sites today. Yahoo!, with its position in the Internet market wants to be a part of this trend by creating applications that lets more social networking happen online.
As a researcher Elizabeth is excited to be a woman in a field, which is mostly dominated by men. "I get to observe different environments and love doing it and as a gender we have to take challenges," says Elizabeth. According to her, technology is a good way to encourage women, by creating forums and communities that are designed specifically for women.
India with 32.1 million internet audience is also on the Yahoo! Research's radar and the team is studying the trends to design applications to the cultures present here. "India is like a mythical wonderland for me, it is overwhelming to be here," she concluded on her experience of being in India.
