Ask HN: Review my startup: metadatalabs.com and debsnews.com

6 points

15 years ago

This is a two-parter. metadatalabs finds web video, annotates it with useful metadata and delivers it via a free API. On average, 17 videos a second representing over 40 hours of video a minute go through our firehose. Our goal is to build an API for video that is as simple and useful as Twitter's API is for tweets.

Details are here: http://api.metadatalabs.com

You'll find a couple of working sample apps, VideoRoulette and VideoDeck, which will give you a feel for what's available in the firehose.

debsnews is a video news service built on top of the firehose:

http://debsnews.com

The UI model has elements of both Twitter and Hacker News / Reddit. Channels follow a link structure much like Twitter. Every channel has two views: A real-time feed under "Most Recent" (like Twitter) and under "Most Popular" a rank based on popularity decaying over time (like Hacker News, Reddit and others.) You can rapidly skim the most popular news videos or spend more time and dig down into details.

We're so close to the problem and we've been at it so long that it's become hard to tell if what we have is actually useful or if we're deluded. We're eager to hear what you think. Feel free to respond here on HN or contact me directly: david at metadatalabs dot com.

Thanks!