Appatic

Magma (Mag.ma) is a Social Online Video Portal aiming to become The Guide for Online Video in the web. Think off it as a Stumbleupon meets Digg that happens to  focus on Online Videos, and you will get the right idea of it.  This is of course a resumed idea of what it is. But i already wrote a entry about before if you want to read more on the site and get what it is about.

Given this is a update to that post, i am going to focus in the updates that Magma added a week ago, pretty much a month after having quick viewed it.

Bookmarklet

This one so you can go around browsing and feed videos up directly to your Magma account very quickly. Functions are basic but there is not really much you can add to a bookmarklet without crippling its main points (speed & ease)  because you overcomplicated the concept. So it is good.

Grab it

Video Importer

This was quite an obvious missing part when i first saw magma. But now they finally added it. With it, you can import videos you have made and that are in YouTube or Vimeo. It also aggregates the ones you favorite so you don’t even have to use the Bookmarlet.

Try it

Feeds

Another thing that baffled me was how Magma didn’t had Feeds in case you would want to track video lists from the site on your own without counting on the magma website.

You only need to add the termination “.rss” and it should serve every content page in the site. Late addition but i like that it was now added in boldly way.

Api

This one i don’t know. Since it have not seen it or have seen anything done with it yet. a leap of faith on magma being already worthy of being leveraged into other apps. I think that in the case of a site like Magma, i would have waited until the site was what it is supposed to be as they already aspire and that even got a mock up to point to where they are aiming. I think a Demo app and a cross platform mobile would be more important right now that having a API just for the sake of having it.

Check it

Widgets

Wish it was my favorite update from Magma. it was not. yet a very welcoming update to what was a even more disappointing showing when there was only a single widget.

The problem is that they are only JavaScript Widget-Badges. I would expect Widgets able to auto-share themselves and more importantly; To be somewhat interactive so they could display detailed information about the videos they list. They aren’t.

The only thing going for them is that they got the choice so you can use your own CSS. But a in-place way to customize it  directly would have gone a long way.

Look at them

Having said that, at least now you got 3 choices:

User Widget

Available only as a user of Magma. It shows what you have added, favorited or what has been aggregated from you.

Magma Must Watch

Top 5 to 10 of Videos that looks like they are taken from the TOP 100 and they happen to be the ones that have the more current movement.

Magma Daily Leaderboard

Top 5 to 10 of Videos that are New from a week time and that are now trending so they could be considered of a “viral” nature.

Final Notes

I think that this last update to Magma was good enough. It still could have been better and within the ranges of any over expecting. Just better updates that are accord to what people now seems to be more interested in:

1. Interaction
2. Mobility
3. More Cowbell.

The last one is a better  way of saying “dazzle” and “bling”. More when it came to the Widget part of the update and the lack as i know of a cross-platform mobile site or demo apps.

Hope that what they see as the goal of how the site must be is close enough to keep or generate better momentum that up to now has been a little bit slow.

Linkage

Mag.ma

via Magma Blog

.

.