Show HN: Sidenote – a web app to take timestamped notes on YouTube videos

by emgo • 6 years ago

6 7 6 years ago

emgo3• 6 years ago

Hi all, I'm a long-time lurker, first-time poster. I just finished the MVP of my quarantine project, a web app to take notes with timestamps on YouTube videos, now online at https://sidenote.me

This is something I use for myself to create my own summaries of conference talks and content-rich videos, also so that I can easily jump back to the moment of the video that’s referred in my notes. Here is an example: https://sidenote.me/note/kFedP0DrC6la/how-i-study-languages-...

For now it’s just a little tool I built for myself, and I decided to open it up for others to create and share their notes as well if they find it useful.

Given that I'm not selling anything, I haven’t figure out yet how to grow a user base and even less how to monetize it. If anyone has ideas about that, please share.

Thanks for reading up until now, all feedback is welcome!

purplecats2• 6 years ago

seems to work well. how do you source the index for a video?

emgo3• 6 years ago

Thanks for checking it out and for asking! Eventually, I’d like users to create annotations/indexes of videos themselves. Until then I needed to populate the site so it doesn’t look too empty when people land on it for the first time, and for that I created bot that crawls Youtube and detect relevant content from comments.

purplecats2• 6 years ago

that's smart. full disclosure i created exactly your app but like 8 years ago. exact same purpose. if i did it now (which you have), then one avenue to consider is crawling closed captioning from the youtube video. you should be able to

1) find interesting content and note it on there

2) allow people to search for a spot to go to based on the closed captioning. that sounds pretty neat actually now that i think of it

3) if you wanted to get a little risky, you could watch where people scroll to/pause/get started at from the time stamp query and use that to determine popularity at a certain spot in the video

siddienahar• 6 years ago

Congratulations on building and launching SideNote. You should also checkout https://www.tuberslab.com/ which is a browser extension that does exactly what SideNote do.

The added benefit of using TubersLab is I don't have to take the YouTube video to new web app, I just get the ability right there.

emgo3• 6 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to look at it. Very cool link you shared, I didn't know about it. I also pondered if I should create this app as a browser extension of a standalone website.

I decided to go with a website, because it's easier for non-users to discover content: having to install a plugin or app on one's phone is one order of magnitude more effortful, and search engines can crawl this content but not what's trapped inside an extension or phone app.

Also, if I see more people using it, I'd like to extend to Spotify (as they expand into the realm of podcasts), and possibly audio-only with Libsyn and such.

mapster• 6 years ago

Very neat! I made a similar app called vidinotes - there is a review on YT about it

Show HN: Sidenote – a web app to take timestamped notes on YouTube videos

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