Magnify.net Adds New Video Sources, Ups The Speed

Ah, magnify.net. The service that is a constant reminder of the things I’d like to do, if only I had the time. Back in June, I asked readers what they’d do if only they had more time (and I was referring to doing things online….more time with family wasn’t the kind of thing I was looking for). One of my top “if only” activities was:

I’d take the time to figure out the ins and outs of magnify.net, and I’d run my own channel.

Well, this morning magnify announced new feature releases to both improve performance and add new video aggregation sources. If they’d only add free chocolate chip cookies and Hawaiian Punch, I might be forced to forego an hour of sleep each night and use magnify daily. So, let’s take a look.

1. New Video Aggregation Sources

Since magnify.net exists to help users discover and embed video content, their strength is in both the the breadth of video sources available as well as the filtering capabilities that find only the good stuff and throw away the junk. Kind of paradoxical, but stick with me. The more video sources, the better the chances of finding the “just right” video, but at the same time, magnify’s discovery technology has to be excellent at filtering out videos that don’t fit.

magnify.net’s announcement today adds the following video hosting sites to its roster:

• MySpace
• Hulu
• Vimeo
• College Humor
• Howcast
• MTV Overdrive

These are in addition to YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Veoh, Blip.tv, Google Video, Revver, and just about anyone else you can think of.

When I look at the magnify plugin in my WordPress editor, all of these sources are available as video discovery sources:

2. Make It Faster

In addition to the new sources, magnify.net has “more than doubled” the speed of its video discovery service (I put that in quotes because I haven’t done a speed test). This allows users to search all 15 video sites in less than 10 seconds. I did test that out, and have to admit: it’s quick.

3. The Blogstring Channel

“Okay, okay, enough,” you say. “Show me what it looks like in action.” Well, fine. I have a magnify.net channel for blogstring, and it looks a little like…..

Now that’s pretty cool. With a channel, you just set up automatic searches, and magnify automatically grabs videos related to your search. As a channel curator, you just need to log in and tweak the videos magnify has returned. For instance, you’ll see that my Web 2.0 search has returned multiple instances of the same video. I can just log in and remove the duplicates.

Summary

It would take hours to scour the web to find relevant videos to post on your blog. But magnify.net does it automatically, for free, and in two ways (as a WordPress plugin and automatically in your channel). I’m definitely guilty of being on the magnify.net bandwagon (See way back in October 2007) as I see it as a no-brainer. It’s like someone offering me my own TV Network, for free, and they’ll do all the work for me.