A Fresh Start

It was time. After three years, our look (which had its origins in the original FlipStarz blogger design) was starting to feel dated.

When I created FS in 2008, I envisioned it as a way to share my personal research – a place for pinoy music lovers to hang out. I heavily customized a theme and made it look like I thought a pop culture site should.

In 2011, FlipStarz is a site where various styles of video (and people) come together. It should have a more subtle identity – less about having an awesome background, but creating a stage where the videos and users can really shine. Theoretically it  should be on a light color to be more readable and inviting.

Some of the Pinoy design cliches (the sunburst on the national flag and the red/blue/gold color scheme) needed to be lost or transformed into something different.

Perhaps most importantly, with 3 years of data about how people used the site, I realized we needed to refocus a bit. Certain areas of the site were almost never used, but consumed a large part of our time.

I took the opportunity to start fresh and completely rethink what we could do that was different from the other sites (both awesome and terrible) already out there.

A New Focus

One thing I realized was that FlipStarz had really become about the music videos. There are plenty of places to watch Filipino TV and movies, and trying to include all of Pinoy pop culture watered down our efforts on what was really working. FlipStarz is the best at sorting through the clutter on YouTube and presenting the best OPM music videos to our viewers.

Pinoy music video - that would be the core of our new identity.

We needed to focus on discovery and viewing experience of our users. The Video Catalog needed to be complete, searchable, annotated as much as possible, and most importantly, it needed to include only the best quality videos. If we could do that, people would come back again and again.

Because the focus now is on the catalog, we have updated our video upload policy. People who want to be contributors/librarians will need some training to follow the guidelines (the "Digger's Guide" will get you started). Bands and promoters will have certain boundaries as to what they can put up in the main catalog. All videos will be by approval only. Don't panic, you can still embed any videos (or playlists) you like in the text box on your own page. By restricting what goes in the catalog, we are actually making it more meaningful to be included.

The Blogs area will now be reserved for articles, press releases, and more professional writing, and will also be by approval only – and must be on topic. If you want to rant and rave about your daily journey, do it in blogger, (and put the RSS feed on your profile).

There are plenty of Pinoy musician's forums on the internet, so I'm focusing the artistic and cultural dialog onto the video pages themselves. (still in progress). That's where 90% of our page views are anyway. The forum will be more for people who are working on the catalog and friendly chitchat.

One new feature that isn't really being done anywhere is a 100% Pinoy music video popularity metric (AKA a top 10 list). MYX has one, but  they "mix" in a lot of foreign songs. Actually the whole notion of a weekly list is kind of old-fashioned, going back to "American Top 40" and MTV countdown. I think our solution of a Top 20 calculated daily, weekly, and monthly makes it easy to see what people are enjoying. We use a rolling average, so the lists are continuously updated, and since it is based on just our site, a lot of otherwise unknown artists have a chance to get. You don't need to send a text to vote. All you need to do is view, like, favorite, share – or leave a comment on the video. The more of those you do, the more it floats up the list.

Changing With the Technology

The web has changed a lot in the last 3 years too.

The tremendous rise of Facebook as a hub means that we needed a "Like" button under every video. We have integrated Facebook sign-in directly into the site.

Google and Yahoo and Twitter sign-in are already implemented as well. New users dont need a password to join, and existing users can go into settings » connections to link up their accounts so they never have to sign in again. Also, you can tweet and update your FlipStarz status at the same time directly from you profile.

With its continuing growth, YouTube is really the best place to upload and store videos. Our native upload and encoding engine couldn't keep up with the features they keep adding, and it was costing us a lot in service fees. Since 90% of the videos on the site are YouTube embeds, we figured, why fight it?

Similarly, the Livestream channels in the streaming center were not really optimized for the limited bandwidth, and they had become burdened with Livestream's intrusive ads. They didn't really offer navigation options,  and couldn't deliver HD quality video, but required specialized skills to keep the programming up to date. It was time to let them go.

The music playlists and Jukebox were also sacrificed in the name of doing something better. There are plenty of services out there to upload and share music, and we found a partner that could legally provide you with an unlimited supply of online music streaming. To see our answer to how you should be making playlists, check out the Muziic player under the videos tab.

What hasn't changed is that you can still upload images and flash embeds (Iincluding any music players from other sites) pretty much anywhere in the site, from comments, and forum posts to your profile textbox and even the answers to your profile questions.

Oh, and one more thing...

We got new smileys – well, actually they are essentially the old Yahoo smileys, but it's a nice familiar touch I think.

This Post is Still in Progress

I'll be updating this post over the next few weeks as the redesign is happening. Feel free to leave me a comment to tell me what you think of the changes.