HP Launches Private Video Sharing

One of the bigger problems people have with YouTube is that it’s finicky to set your videos so that just one person or a select few can see them. HP is trying to change all that.

Enter Gabble, a private video sharing site designed to act more like Facebook than YouTube, by only showing your videos to an approved network of friends. Google’s YouTube is more of an open platform, searchable by anyone. Sure you can set videos to private, meaning they’re only viewable by friends and it’s pretty simple. The messy part is when you start to pick and choose which people you want to see which videos. Personal experience tells me it gets even more annoying then when they want to see it and they don’t have the link anymore.

According to the New York Times, Gabble is part of the HP’s strategy of trying out a variety of online, cloud-like services as it hunts for a hit. “If they go viral and take off quickly, then we will support them,” said Shane Robison, HP’s CTO told NYT in an interview. “If they don’t, we’ll take them down pretty quickly,” he finished.

We love this one. NYT cites HP as saying setting videos to private as a default makes life easier on the average person and we’d be inclined to agree. What do you guys think?

UPDATE: Updated at 15:52 (PST) to include link to the Gabble. Cheers to Alex from HP Labs for the URL.