Indecision - an interactive hyper-videoblog story

I just used YouTube's new Annotations tool to make a little interactive videoblog story, done very quickly with my phone. Exciting that this kind of thing can now be created and used so easily, and at YouTube.

You can only see it on YouTube - here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQg_LCq_T8&fmt=18

I've been wanting to play with hypervideo for over 2 years - but the thing that finally spurred me on was YouTube Annotations. I’ve been waiting and hoping that they would introduce something like this.

But at the moment, they only allow you to use it on their site - no embedded players yet.

There are six different parts to it - what path you take is up to you. Click the options at the end of each clip to choose what I do.

I really was feeling indecisive about what to do with my evening - and it proved the perfect subject. I made it up as I went along, and it took 30 mins to shoot and 90 mins to get the clips onto the Mac, onto YouTube and Annotated with links.

I’ve always thought that for my hypervideo dreams to become reality, hyperlinked video would need to be a) easy to use, b) easy to create and c) within a setting that people are already comfortable with.

I’ve been working on much more complex hypervideo stories, and if this quick slapdash bit of fun seems to work, I’ll start putting some together properly. Let me know what you think.

It’s been a good week for me with my old nemesis YouTube. Tumblr saw my High Quality YouTube Embed Generator (thanks to Wreck and Salvage) and implemented it as standard on all Tumblr YouTube embedded players. So I helped make the world a prettier place.

The future is now! Even if this particular part of the future looks a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure book from 1982.