Zero Views App

Ever since I started seeing a lot of traffic on my Underviewed project, I’ve kept a close watch on where people are coming from. Recently, I saw more than one article mentioning a new iOS app called Zero Views, oftentimes followed by a link back to Underviewed.

The app works as advertised, showing one random YouTube video (with low view count), allowing users to skip ahead to the next. In a way, it’s like a portable version of Petit Tube.

I’ll be honest – my first reaction on seeing this app was “Hey, that’s my idea!” But after a moment or so, that thought passed. After all, no one really holds the copyright to the concept of low-viewcount videos. And with hosting my code on GitHub, this kind of thing is the nature of open source.

After checking out the app for a while, I ended up moving away from the feeling of “ownership” towards this idea. Honestly, if anyone has any right to “owning” the idea, it’s the developer who first created Petit Tube (which I didn’t know about, prior to creating Underviewed).

Ultimately, I think it’s about implementation, and how one goes about presenting this content. AFter all, there are countless ways that people go about sharing photos, so it comes down to execution.

I ended up reaching out to the developer, and learned that my site was a source of inspiration for the app. And it felt great!

I ended up chatting with the developer, voicing some of my concerns for the recent spate of violent videos that had been circulating due to my project. I learned that he maintains a database of YouTube video references. And for problematic videos, he designates them as such in his DB and also flags them on YouTube proper.

The DB angle was eye-opening to me, as that’s now how I approached using the YouTube API. But with an app and the problem of potentially multiple users at one time, the DB approach gets around YouTube’s API rate limit. Which makes total sense, in hindsight (and also affords a lot of other benefits as well).

In talking about violent/problematic videos, I also learned that his SafeSearch settings were set to ‘strict’ while mine were only set to ‘moderate.’ I had assumed the settings wouldn’t matter much, given the low view counts… but I’ve since changed the settings on the website to also reflect ‘strict.’

The number of videos that show up is now considerably less, but I think the chances of a problematic video are now also lessened. We’ll see how this goes.

It was neat talking with someone who was basically working with the exact same data I’m used to working with, and learning about how they tackled various problems.

I made a pretty huge move in Version 2.0 of my Augur app, moving things away from the device and handling everything server-side. Hearing how someone else approached YouTube data now has me wondering if I should also rethink how things are structured, and fiddle with things behind the scenes.

Related:
Underviewed: Searching YouTube Using Default Video File Names
On the Darkness of Randomness
Underviewed Getting Overviewed