The Domesticated Primate

Well, a little while ago, Miro 2.0 made a big splash. Of course, within a day or two, I downloaded it, especially because I read it was supposed to be less of a hog (the older one often made my laptop overheat and shutdown, but a lot of apps do that to my laptop, to be honest).

Anyway, I installed it, and had a problem right away. It simply wouldn't run, and told me to check the log. I posted about it on their feedback site, and got a suggestion to try one of the nightly builds.

I did so, and that one works. I like what I see so far. I like how the video can now be split off from the main screen - however, I don't like that the controls for the video stay with the main screen. Maybe there is an option to change this; I haven't looked yet.

But here's one thing I found out how to do, and this is pretty cool: you can build your own RSS feeds via this site Ubeek.com, and add them as a channel to Miro. I don't think this is a new feature of 2.0, per se, but still, pretty cool.

Youtube needs to open things up to Miro and let it work directly with Miro, but in the long term, I wonder how viable Youtube will be, anyway, at least for the more knowledgeable digerati.

They seem to be opting for the walled garden approach, and cranking up the censorship, and there are lots of alternatives to them, anyway.

I still like searching for some documentaries on video.google.com, but, if given the choice, I'd much rather queue up things via something like Miro and watch them offline. I also want an app to start building up things I like and start recommending things, and do it in one place, and be agnostic to any one website, such as Youtube and/or video.google.com. Something like StumbleUpon, but instead of just for websites in general, to do it for videos (and maybe audio) in particular.

It looks like Miro is starting down that path, but from what I can tell, it's for channels, not down to the video.