vSocial is a free video sharing website that hosts everything from previews for upcoming movies to your own homemade videos.
Free
You retain the rights to your work. However, vSocial can do what they want with it until you remove it from the site. No content that is obscene, hateful, illegal, infringes copyright or includes advertising is allowed.
vSocial asks for your name, email address, a username and a password.
Once you hit “Submit” you’ll be taken to a profile page where you can fill out a whole profile, rather like MySpace, though you’re not required to provide any further information. Clicking “Upload” in the upper right will take you right to the upload form.
vSocial is VERY limited when it comes to video formats: they only support .mpg, .avi and .wmv. File size limit is 100MB. On the upload form you can add a title, description and tags, enable several different kinds of comments, choose to set the video to private, and also choose a Creative Commons license for your video.
When you hit “Submit” the whole screen goes dark except for a window displaying a progress bar. It’s not too fast, not too slow.
vSocial uses Flash to compress videos uploaded to the site.
vSocial videos don’t look bad, but suffer from two problems: first of all, the vSocial logo in the corner of your video, even though small, is still annoying; second, as soon as your video is done the viewer displays several superimposed links that obscure the first second or so of video if you play it again.
Also, when you look at your videos, they’re displayed as three consecutive thumbnails, which is a little odd, and the site in general looks a little too much like MySpace for my taste.
To share a vSocial video, wait until the video is done playing. Some sharing options will show up on the player screen.
To send a friend a link to the video, click the “Send to Friend” box and enter an email address. To embed the video in another website, click the “Embed Video” box. This will display HTML code that you can copy and paste.
You can also share the video using the “Share” menu to the right of the player. Click one of the icons to post the link to a site like Facebook or del.icio.us, or copy and paste the HTML code provided to embed a small or regular size player in another website.
