My work at Nextide has kept me very busy and the past 6 months has been even more so if that was possible. For the past year, we have been working with a startup company in Montreal on several portal projects based on geeklog. The sites are quite complex with much of that complexity hidden under the covers but geeklog has proven itself as a solid web-development and portal framework.
Two of the project sites were launched a couple weeks and have been picked up by major media outlets and were given a major test last week when techcrunch posted an article. We are now running on Amazon EC2 and after some code optimization, now able to scale to the thousands of concurrent users making movies and serving up video's.
There are many updates planned in the coming months for the sites, that include new portal functionality as well as application changes and new content. We have been working with a great team at Xtranormal in Montreal and have wanted to talk about the project sooner but we have been under non-disclosure and still can really only discuss the publicly available information.
The first site is www.xtranormal.com and is the featured portal for Xtranormal and uses their propitiatory 3D rendering engine to create high quality animated short video's by just entering the text, selecting the actors, backgrounds and if you want sound effects, animated gestures and camera angles. Click on publish and you have a movie that you can share on facebook, youtube or enjoy on the site. There are many new creative content channels planned as well as new application functionality. The site makes extensive use of AJAX and web-services but this has all been created as a plugin or extended functions to the base geeklog portal.
Leveraging the work on the xtranormal portal, we were asked to work on a completely different application the creative folks at xtranormal came up with. The site www.mashface.com lets you use your web-cam to mash or merge video and sound over a fixed image and create some pretty funny clips. A lot of the site members are using images of friends and family and making them say some pretty funny lines but there are also a lot of stock images to play with. The site admin's are promoting some of the funnier clips that can be surfaced as featured clips but most are just being shared with friends and family.
[Update - Oct 29]The mashface site has just been launched with a new theme and site layout updated.
