Video is here

by Chris Putnam Friday, June 22, 2007 at 11:18am

Sometime in early January my roommate (also a Facebook engineer) and I were talking late at night in the office and shared a realization: we both had tons of videos we had taken with our phones and digital cameras, and had nowhere to put them. Of course, plenty of video sharing sites already existed, but none provided useful distribution to our friends (like Facebook's Photos application). Now that consumer mobile phones and digital cameras are perfectly capable of taking good quality video, we knew that it was time to build a video application on top of the social graph.

With the January Hackathon just around the corner, we had the perfect opportunity to work on Video and show our fellow engineers just how useful we believed it would be. A few months of iteration later, we're very proud to present this to you.

Video is something that's been around on a lot of other sites, but few have truly useful ways to share your videos with your friends. We think we've fixed this problem. We also saw plenty of other issues with the other products out there and tried our best to do better. Here are some of the highlights.

Videos of your friends are interesting. You can tag your friends in videos just like you would with Photos. Since video on Facebook involves people you actually know, it's much more interesting content and much more relevant.

Higher quality videos. Our video player has much better quality and privacy controls than most other video sharing sites. We also support many more source formats and we don't letterbox any of our content.

Video messaging. Video messaging is cool because it is asynchronous, meaning you can send what is essentially "video voicemail" back and forth with a friend or even many friends at once. Plus, it's all integrated into the Inbox.

Mobile integration. We support most mobile providers, so all you have to do is take a video on your phone and email it to video@facebook.com.

Since Facebook Platform was under development at the same time as Video, the Platform team used Video for cues as to what hooks and features we needed to provide to 3rd party developers. Anyone could have built Video for Facebook, which is why you have to add Video to your account, just like you would add any other application. Enjoy!

Chris Putnam, a Facebook engineer, is heading to Vegas for his 21st birthday and is now unsure if building Video was a good idea.

Updated over a year ago

Kenneth, Michael, Matthew and 3 others like this.

View all 28 comments

Dorothy Cooper

are you on the stock exchange? if so under what name? and if so what is the price of a stock. dorothycooper@bellsouth.net

will be waiting for your answer

July 10 at 10:25am

Eddie Glatfelter

SMILES ARE CONTAGIOUS

October 14 at 8:09am

Jonathan Soriano

Dear Mr. Putnam,
My friends and I have formed a group to implore your invention of a new emoticon. Since <(") is a penguin, and B) is a smiley with sunglasses, we would appreciate very, very much if you were to make <(B) a sunglasses-wearing penguin. Please at least respond to this message, our hopes are high that you will help us.

October 17 at 6:35pm

Kenneth Alambra

I like the idea of the sunglasses-wearing penguin. :D

October 26 at 12:47pm

Shihab Uddin

My account with msuworld@gmail.com disabled on 28.10.09. Since then i have mailed more than hundred times to facebook authority at the info@facebook.com,warning@facebook, appeal@facebook.com .But all i got the automated reply of help but nobody helped. I have my important
contacts,groups and photos in my facebook account. Since then every time i ... Read Morecheck my e-mail again & again & also facebook with the hope that they may have noticed me now, but seems they don't have an inbox in their mailing service, I'm so much depressed with this and telling to my friends facebook is not a permanent media of communication,keep backup of everything u have in facebook cause facebook can shutdown anyone's account at any time without prior warning.I don't is this facebook's policy or not but their attitude towards me told me that their motto of doing business is that no customer care for free service and as they provide free service so, don't need to pay any heed to customers ,whatever they say.I don't know i'll ever get any reply from them or not or whether they will activate my lost account or not, But what i lost is that,all the connections i had from last two years, photos, friends and i may not be able to get them again,cause facebook authority will never reply cause they have a pretty awesome customer care service. Anywayz thanks facebook authority for making me realize the right meaning of facebook's business.

November 5 at 9:36pm