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I got an invite to Hey!Watch’s private beta today, and after trying it out I agree that it’s a very useful tool for collecting online-video. after installing the firefox-extension (works with Flock as well) or the provided bookmarklet, it’s just a single click to bring online video to your mobile player. Hey!watch seems to work with most video-sharing sites, I successfully tested it with content from YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe. video-clips can be converted into mpeg4, mpeg2, flash, divx, mov and dvd, with optimized presets for various devices (iPod, PSP, Wii, PocketPC and many more). what’s really great about Hey!Watch: the application exposes an RSS-feed containing all encoded clips - subscribe to this feed in iTunes, and you’ll have all your video synched to your iPod video-player. currently in private beta , Hey!Watch is obviously processing requests for invitation pretty fast.

after a short but very much-required hiatus for myself, it’s time to pick up this blog with various bits of news I stumbled upon during the last days…kind-of emulating Marc Canter’s primary posting-style…

while most users are still waiting for their Gmail-accounts to fetch external POP-mail, Google Operating System has got some screenshots & descriptions. Gmail supports up to 5 POP-accounts (only for retrieval, outgoing-mail is still processed by Gmail and therefor includes Gmail-headers). all mail is syndicated into one inbox.

Multiverse is an upcoming (2007) 3D-framework & client/server-infrastructure, allowing 3rd-party content-publishers to create & host their very own virtual worlds at minimal cost. think of Multiverse as various branded, independent Second Life-grids (according to rumours, a scenario Linden Labs itself is actually thinking of in the near future). while the idea seems to advance on Second Life’s concept, it’s still not “open” in the way of fully exposing protocols/interfaces - which would bascially allow anyone to build their own (opensource-)clients & servers.

according to TechCrunch, Hey!Watch is the next big thing in online-video conversion (compare ZamZar or Media Convert). Hey!Watch removes much friction by offering various ways of importing video-data: besides the usual upload-form, Hey!Watch provides a bookmarklet to import any (f.e. YouTube-)video, a Firefox-plugin and even automatic import of RSS-enclosures. video-files are processed to fit on your iPod, PSP or mobile phones, users may subscribe to their converted files via RSS. sounds very good, indeed.

ok, that wasn’t as telegraphic as I supposed it would be, anyway