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  There was a lot of criticism when I declared Youtube’s Annotations feature as innovative and amazing from the users of Neowin in my last post Youtube’s latest feature – Annotations. I was told of DeviantART’s video annotations feature and also Nicovideo ( which is a Japanese website so it wont be compared here due to language difference.) So in my re-research on this, I also came across Viddler which provides a similar feature although in a much different way.

DeviantART

After going to DeviantART’s website and searching for any sort of video sharing information, I had to sign up. After that I noticed that searching through categories showed one category as Films and Animations. Then after checking out the submission page, I read this:

Upon further investigation, this was the reason found:

Now, just how can anyone compare DeviantART to a major video sharing website like Youtube is beyond me. I do realize there are all sorts of people in the world, but I don’t expect a bunch of them lazing around Neowin. Anyhow, I checked an already uploaded user video, and it showed up the annotation feature. But the annotations could be submitted by any user, so that it can be very easily spammed. The annotations feature IS very different from Youtube as well, as it doesn’t provide any sort of interactivity on the video as an overlay. The annotations are just shown when the seek bar reaches the time at which the annotation was posted. Other then that, no speech bubbles, no notes and no spotlight in overlays.

Verdict: Nothing like Youtube!

Viddler

I learnt about Viddler through some sources. I liked the website, and it’s feature to allow you to tag specific moments within a video as well as post comments to specific moments inside the video. Granted, it all sounds cool and very interactive, you still can’t reach your viewers through your video as with Youtube Annotations.

It shows the user picture with the comment, and also has the ability of showing ads with the tags made in the timeline.

Verdict: Although it still doesn’t match the overlay effects that Youtube gives, it sure brings a whole new level of interactivity through comments on certain moments of the video as it replaces the text comments which used to go “Funny gut at 1:00 minutes!�.

I haven’t been able to review Nicovideo, as even through translation I haven’t been able to navigate to any video. I have read that it provides overlays so that might be something what Youtube just introduced in their service. I’ll be keeping our readers updated as I find more information on this.

And as for the innovation part of Youtube Annotations. Here’s a little meaning of innovations for certain people.

Innovation – noun : something new or different introduced.

Update: Just found another video sharing website Veeple with speech and thought bubble capabilities as overlays on videos, seems very interesting, so I’ll be updating this blog post soon.