Microblogging in 140 Characters Leads to 4-Second Microvideos with Robo.to

“With ROBOTO you record short video clips reflecting your current mood and status, and they accompany your status text wherever you send it!”

In May, 2009, Particle, the San Francisco based start-up funded by Justin Timberlake, launched Robo.to – a 4-second video application that allows mobile device or Web cam users to upload and simultaneously post video snippets to their social networks. Twitter, facebook, flickr and other useful sites are all in one place and you can publish to all of them at the same time.

Mobile robo.to users not only get to see the faces of all the people in their address books, they get a mini-video of what they are up to!

TechCrunch explains, “The site also prominently features a spot for a ‘video avatar’ – a brief video clip that’s meant to take the place of traditional emoticons or static photos, which you can broadcast to a number of popular online services. It’s a neat concept, reminiscent of the moving photographs from Harry Potter.”

The Robo.to Features Blog at: http://massive.ly provided the following means of adding an ever-changing video status widget to your site or blog: “Just cut and paste the embed code from your share ‘Share my Face‘ page and you’re done. It automatically displays updates to displaying your latest. If you dare, you can also make some tweaks to the code settings and customize it to your needs and desires.”

Size

By default the size is set to a 288 pixel square. You can change the size of the badge by changing this variable to whatever pixel size you wish. There are a total of four instances of this in the code that would need to be changed.

Border

By default we have a 7px border. Simply change the 7px to 0px in order to remove the border. Simply change the color from black to another HTML color like pink or lightblue if you don’t like the dark gray.

Loop

By default we loop the video status playback endlessly. If you think this will be too annoying on your page, you can turn off the looping and have it only play once after the page loads. Mousing over it will play it. To do this, simply look for the &loop=1 bit in the code and change it to &loop=0. There are two instances of this in the code that would need to be changed.

Text

By default we also display the status message text over the video. If you prefer to not display this, simply look for the &hideBlerb=0 bit in the code and change it to &hideBlerb=1. There are two instances of this in the code that would need to be changed.