Jordan based development firm Tootcorp have launched Zoofs, the first of its kind Youtube video discovery tool based on whatever people are talking about on Twitter.
The service goes through tweets and applies an algorithm to filter out those which it considers popular, displaying them according to categories or time of upload to Youtube. And just in case you get overwhelmed by the amount of videos to chose from, the tootcorp video aficionados apply their personal ‘Must Watch’ ribbon to videos you can’t live without seeing.
The user interface is simple with a focus on content & functionality, built utilizing Youtube’s support for HTML5 making it functional on devices such as the iPhone & the iPad.
The company also known for their regional successes WatWet (aka the Arabic Twitter), Ikbis & Toot are breaking the mold with Zoofs by targeting a much wider global audience than their previous projects, which mainly drew from the Middle Eastern user base in the Social Media/Networking domain.
We asked Kareem Arafat about moving to a global audience and he said:
“Zoofs is the result of our strategy to have some departure from strictly regional localization of content to a broader audience,” he also added “we had a lot of fun playing with internally before we launched it to the public”. When asked about funding he responded “the project has received no funding till now, but we’re talking to people about that at the moment”.
The project is a mashup of many technologies to further utilize the services it builds upon considering that “there is so much data out there that still hasn’t been used, like audio and text and we plan to make the most of these things in this project and others”. For those techies of you out there, the service is built using different tools including Erlang, MongoDB and Ruby on Rails.
pretty impressed. I’m sure this has been done before somewhere but nevertheless, they’ve done a good job with it. This cat video nearly brought me to tears… http://zoofs.com/#/videos/GAaH_HlUD68
I had the same impression when I first heard about it, but couldn’t find any. I especially like the Zoofs Pick feature. Can’t wait till they integrate Watwet in the mix to see which videos Arabs like most.
Thanks for the feature guys! We have not found anything similar to Zoofs, if you come across something let us know!
Kudos to you guys, I love a service that makes a staring you in the face idea a reality.