New version of BTV is coming!

It’s been a long time since last news about BTV development, but it really worth it! Now I want to spoil some of coming changes with this site…First of all, we’ve started development of completely new BTV engine with completely different ideology than this site has now. Thanks to great tools (Ruby on Rails) and my friend Dmytro Shteflyuk we’ve already implemented most of new functionality planned for initial release and going to roll out new release really soon (looks like it’ll take 2-3 weeks because of high load of project developers). So, what you’ll get in new release?

First of all, we’re going to ’socialize’ this site - all of our reader would be able to register here and get highly customizable interface along with really cool feature - customizable RSS feeds. You’ll be able to select just what you like to read here on site and in your RSS readers and engine would show you all newly posted videos in categories/tags/etc you’ve asked it to show. Along with customization, you’ll be able to save videos you loved on this site to your favorite videos list and watch them again when you want.

Next ’social’ feature would be user groups - it will be neat idea of grouping users with similar interests and sharing great videos between them. Every user group will get its own start page and RSS feed, so you’be able to add this feed to your personal page and watch videos your fellow users like to watch.

Of course, we’re going to add voting for videos to let you, our users, to vote for videos you like and share your impressions with other site users. Later we’ll be able to suggest you new cool videos to watch based on your favorites and positive votes.

And last but not least for the first release would be maybe of the most valuable features of new BTV - user-generated content. Service users and video author would be able to post here videos they saw somewhere and share their experience with their friends and other people who like to watch Best Tech Videos. To keep high level of quality of our service, we’ve invented set of rules and user levels that will guarantee only the best videos will be posted here.

If you’re an author of one screencast or even big screencasts site owner, you’ll be able to register here and we’ll give you set of really cool tools for videos sharing to post your new videos here. Of course we’ll help you to import your old videos here to help you to drive more traffic to your site and to share your knowledge with constantly growing userbase of this service.

So, as you can see, we’ve prepared lots of new features for first release of new completely redone BTV. So, stay tuned and we promise - you’ll be impressed with new service! If you want to participate in closed beta testing phase of new service development (both as author or as generic user), drop me a line on beta at bestechvideos dot com or leave comment here.