Community Toolkit in Action
Last year we introduced the Community Toolkit, which gives customers community-building features such as ratings, comments, tags, favorites, polls, and user accounts for their PDK players. Since then, our customers have found ways to integrate these features into their video web sites at an ever-increasing rate. Every day our system handles over 2.4 million ratings, over 1 million favorites lists, and more than 155 thousand user profile requests.
As Joey Lesh, Program Manager for the Community Toolkit put it, “One of the useful aspects of the Community Toolkit is its flexibility. Customers can place any combination of elements such as comments, ratings, tags, or favorites lists directly into players with the PDK plug-in components, or programmatically with the API. For example, we have some customers using ratings to power a ’1 to 5’ ratings system, and others using a ‘bump-style’ interface like those seen in Digg or Yahoo! Buzz.”
In addition to storing community activities for certain video content, the Community Toolkit also lets you use customer accounts to store demographic or other custom information. You can also integrate community features with other user account systems, giving your developers a lot more options for seamlessly integrating with your existing user management systems.
Cisco encourages interaction with community features
Cisco integrated a number of community features into their video submission site at digitalcribs.net. DiGiTAL CRiBS describes itself as a “new series about the human network and how we use consumer technology in new and exciting ways.” It features profiles of philanthropists and social leaders, student film submissions from leading film schools, and video from the general audience. The site has made extensive use of ratings, and comments in particular. Go to digitalcribs.net to see more.
Written by: Nathan Rohm, Product Manager
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