Showyou launched way back in April 2011, with one underlying mission: to deliver the best mobile app for watching and sharing videos.
Available for both iPhone and iPad, Showyou lets you browse videos shared by your Facebook and Twitter friends, while also enabling you to follow video feeds form other users and channels, covering the likes of The Daily Show, TED, Reddit TV, Pitchfork and more.
Today, Showyou is launching a major update to its iPhone app, which follows five months after Showyou 3.0 landed on the iPad with better video discovery and sharing features.
The iPhone/iPod Touch app has been rebuilt from the ground up, with a new interface and features created exclusively for the iPad’s little brothers.
What’s new?
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When you first launch the app, you’ll be asked to sign-in with Facebook, Twitter or simply try it as a guest. Once in, you’ll see a brand new Showyou video feed (right-hand image):
The Showyou feed sits right at the heart of this new launch. “It magically delivers the right videos to you at any given time,” the company said in a statement. “We use all the social signal data we collect to identify the best videos shared recently by your friends or people you follow.”
Interestingly, the feed isn’t all about the ‘here and now’, so if you’ve not checked Showyou for four days, the best videos over the past four days are surfaced for you.
Also, to help users decide what to watch, social context is evident in the feed. For example, if a number of friends from across Twitter, Facebook and Showyou have shared the same video, the app highlights this and displays the whole commentary from everyone in one place.
There’s also a new ‘Send to Friend’ feature lets users share videos with a handful of friends simultaneously, either with your Showyou contacts or your iPhone contacts. This requires just a couple of taps from within the app.
Another minor inclusion has been the reintroduction of its ‘Thanks’ feature, which lets you show your appreciation when someone shares a video you watch.
So rather than typing out a comment, you simply hit the button, and bang. This feature was included for the initial launch of this app last year, but was subsequently removed.
So overall, a neat new interface and a slew of nice updates for Showyou. For anyone who wants to isolate all the great video-shares across their social sphere – on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimoe or Tumblr, Showyou’s got you covered.
“With this new version of Showyou, we think we’ve built the first truly great video app for the iPhone or, indeed, any smartphone,” says the company.
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