For the Emacs nerds among us, you can hack something similar together: when you start the video, also start a timer running in Emacs org-mode with `org-timer-start` (`C-c C-x 0`) You can then insert timestamped notes with `C-c C-x -`, and once you've got a timestamp note, you can hit `M-RET` to insert a new one with a new timestamp.
That's a great tip in general, but I assume the biggest benefit here really is being able to pause, rewind and seek around while staying in sync, which would be much harder for some external timer.
oh welcome to the first day of the rest of your life emacs and org-mode are an investment that will pay dividends in your productivity for the rest of your life
I have definitely been told by people that sharing this with them has significantly improved their quality of life, so I share it any chance I get. It's especially handy that it works with almost all online videos. (I have no affiliation, just a huge fan)
In fact, writing this comment inspired me to submit it as it's own top level post on HN.
The "Use example video" walk-through does not permit simply clicking through the demo. On the "This is the section where you are going to write your annotations." div, when you click the bottom next-arrow to proceed, it insists "Please, write a title and/or a body".
Users wishing to quickly "scroll" through the demo, are thus prevented from using that style of perusal. Some will punt. Perhaps this is an intentional tradeoff, sacrificing some, to increase engagement of others? It might be interesting to A/B test that. Perhaps the "user provides video url" and
"use example video" cases might be handled differently? Perhaps a "Continue with worked example? y/n" instead of the error, to still nudge towards engagement, but with a lower barrier to "I just want to see your thing - why are you stopping me?"?
The reason I am doing that is because there is some UI that appears _after_ you start typing in the input/text area. So I can't show the walkthrough until you do that. You can always just close the tour and interact with the page.
I'll think on how to avoid that though. Thanks for the feedback!
niiiiiiiiice... i think this is something that alot of schools could use since everything is going online.
i'm going to echo @rkhassen9 observation that your pricing model isn't attractive to the average person. this is totally my opinion, but the value here is the amount of notes you collect. while the average person is not willing to pay to record note, businesses are definitely willing to pay to retrieve the notes of others. if you let people annotate an unlimited number of votes with an unlimited number of notes you will build your database faster. then you could charge businesses to have access to those notes via an API. on a consumer side of that, individuals could see all of their notes but can only see the last 5 recent notes for others.
all in all though, this is a really cool product and will definitely be a game changer as more and more schools and classes move to online.
I'm trying to understand why businesses would pay for these notes. The only things that come to mind are research/AI purposes-- essentially having a dataset to feed into marketing or market-research efforts? Maybe someone can enlighten me.
businesses pay HUGE money for focus groups and A/B testing. think of the notes as detailed points of these. not to mention a wider and honest sample pool.
People are going to build for the tools that have strong network effects. Those Roam clones you mention have none at the present moment.
And I don't see how a Roam Research integration would be "leeching value," especially because it will eventually be possible to build paid plugins for Roam, which opens the revenue door for devs building plugins.
didn't know about docdrop, I thought it was similar to Annotate.tv but I got: "Our video annotation capability works for YouTube videos that have either human or machine-generated transcripts.". That's not a requisite on Annotate.
You need to choose a YT video that has a auto-generated transcript. About 80%+ videos do I think. Choose another one. Docdrop+Hypothesis only works on transcripts-- it's not a timecode video annotator.
Feedback: The "Cancel" and "Create" buttons are too close to each other. If you accidentally click on the "Cancel" button you lose your entire note. Perhaps move the cancel button to a less prominent position and add a confirmation dialog box.
And I've stopped commenting on Youtube because a single Tab-Return hits the Cancel button. You have to remember to Tab-Tab-Return to hit the Comment button. It's like it was designed to loose comments!
My favorite is when the ‘next-video’ timer decides you weren’t leaving a comment and sends you to a new page. Of course the comment is lost when you go back.
A couple months ago I launched a site (https://familymemorystream.com/) that allows annotating videos but is targeted towards the niche of converted family videos.
I was considering opening it up to make a generic "video note taker" version; it looks like you beat me to it :)
Best wishes! It will be interesting to see where you end up with the pricing model. It looks like you're using YouTube/Vimeo for the video hosting so that frees you up to do one-time purchases if you want since your server costs will likely stay fairly constant across scale.
that looks great. Yeah, I'm still figuring out the business model. I think a one time purchase is probably what I'm going to do. BTW, after launching it in Product Hunt I saw a few similar ideas too :)
You could probably sell subscriptions to you-tubers who want to annotate videos on their channels. I am sure they would find a way to do cool things with it.
This has a nice UI, well done on launching! I made something similar but never really thought of monitising it. The focus was on the tagging/annotating for power users with keyboard shortcuts: https://tagx.io
At the same time, I would never buy it unless I was somehow earning residual income by having it.
SASS pricing not a good model for the average consumer due to the way costs accrue.
If there as a free tier for unlimited personal usage or a one time reasonable fee for unlimited personal usage, I’d probably jump on this. (If I’m going to bother to use a tool, I want a level that I can use on all my personal projects - the model of a few for free is just a waste of time for me) And then a paid tier for people want to use it professionally - eg sharing permissions etc.
yeah, I didn't implement payments yet because I'm not sure about the model. Maybe a one time price makes sense... it sucks that I just launched on ProductHunt, maybe it would have been a good strategy to launch having that in mind. Thanks for the feedback!
