Let’s get right into demand.
Both personal and social needs for vlogs have emerged and will continue emerging indefinitely. Each user has his own unique balance of personal and social needs. Supplemental is versatile enough to fulfill each user’s needs without sacrificing simplicity.
Since this is My Dream App, I’ll start with my own personal uses and then talk about the greater market.
The Importance of the Mac
I’ve been an off and on journal writer since I was eight (about 15 years ago) and have wanted a video logging app for about as long.
After a few years my family ditched the 386 for a PowerMac and I moved from writing in notebooks to typing on a computer. QuickTime made its debut and teased all of us with its Star Trek-y vision of Macintosh A/V. Yeah, I could’ve started writing on the old PC like Doogie Howser, but he didn’t have a Mac! (That always puzzled me, btw.)
The Mac was and is much more inviting and visual. I couldn’t resist the temptation to spruce the journal up with some art. Journaling with just words gets boring real fast. I looked forward to the day when I could add audio and video. Real starship Enterprise kind of stuff.
Like cell phones, 3.5″ disks, and women in space, that future would have its day. That day is now! :)
The Added Value of Vlogs
Video is the ultimate in casual and efficient recording of personal thoughts.
While journal writing, I often felt the need to be verbose and formal, worried that a future reader lacking emotional context would misunderstand the text. This is evident in the greater social climate of the Internet. Emails, forums, chat rooms, and blogs are rife with personal misunderstandings simply because text is inefficient for communicating the vast subtleties of emotion and behavior, which are so necessary for personal thoughts. Most of us are not expert poets and prose writers anyway. Everyone is much better in person. Vlogs cut away the confusion and distance by opening us to facial expressions, body language, tone, inflection, and general appearance, among other things. They also give us an active pictorial reference of our lives, which make better and longer-lasting memories.
Vlogs put the “person” back into “personal log.” Without motion and sound, the person is limited to playing the mysterious and eventually frustrating role of author. That frustration has been enough for me to avoid journaling for long periods of time.
So, I wish to use vlogging to embrace journaling again and amplify its many benefits. Prime among these benefits are greater self-understanding. With a vlog, I will regularly see and hear me the way others see and hear me. Vlogs surpass even the mirror.
Dream Vlogging
I’m only now getting to my most long-awaited use for Supplemental.
When I started journaling those many years ago, I also kept a dream journal, and it was astoundingly rewarding. Through the journal I discovered lucid dreams. What amazing experiences they are. I’m lucky to have had them at all, much less grow up with them.
I won’t elaborate on lucid dreaming specificually. What’s relevant here is that I rarely have them unless I am in the process of keeping a diligent dream journal. And this is very difficult. When I’m tired and I need to go to work or school in the morning, it’s a mean pain in the ass to get out of bed three or four times during the night and write or type. My coordination may be off. Maybe my hand is numb from sleeping on it funny.
Dream vlogging to my rescue. How convenient and exciting it would be to face a camera and talk about what just happened. Fewer words are needed, since I can look back on my own subtle emotional reaction - a far superior mnemonic.
Change hours of arduous writing into minutes of effortless talking, drop in a couple keywords, add an archiving function, some Leopard skin for show, and the result is literally my dream app.
So far this is just my personal use. Using it to send video messages to friends and family and to make a video podcast would also be on the horizon. Maybe do a Numa-Numa video on YouTube? Only joking!
I’ll pause here and continue in my next post, where I’ll study the nascent social demand and discuss the current state of the vlogosphere and its opportunities for the MDA team.
In the mean time, I’d love to hear your comments. :)
