And the “death note” in question is Omnisio, a video commenting service that Google has just acquired (according to Sankaku Complex) that has remarkably similar features to NicoNico Douga, the vaguely YouTube-esque video site where people comment on the videos they watch and get to see their own (and others’) comments appear on the video screen in realtime whenever they watch the video from then on.
Omnisio is currently in beta as part of YouTube (details here), and it isn’t identical to NicoNico, with comments showing as speech bubbles and only added by the video poster so far, rather than the general public of registered users. (This was not the case in original Omnisio site, so who knows how Google will develop the feature.)
Now, will this destroy NicoNico? Honestly, I’m not sure if the annotations feature will be the killer: one of the biggest difficulties of NicoNico is that you have to be registered to watch a video and you can’t embed it anywhere. One of the main reasons to choose NicoNico over YouTube was simply access to those comments, so it stands to reason that if YouTube hammers out a decent system with Omnisio, some NicoNico users may make the switch.
But only time will tell!
Tags: google, niconico, youtube
July 31st, 2008 at 11:46 am
So are the word bubbles just randomly popping up? I don’t really care for the word bubbles, but then again, scrolling text takes some getting used to as well (even though we see it more often in today’s media).
July 31st, 2008 at 11:52 am
Personally, I hate the comment thing in Nico. I turn it off everytime a video begin. It just a stupid idea imo.
July 31st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I love nico comments! But the Omnisio system isn’t quite as good. Scrolling is less invasive then pop-ups, and there’s the fact that they’re not user-submitted comments…only video-creator ones.