Moving Beyond YouTube

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Video production is moving from being something that only a specialist can do to being something that's available to the masses, says Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and lecturer at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. "It's getting easier and easier," he says, "and the tools for production and distribution are becoming more widely available." Jumpcut, he says, is an example of the convergence of online social networking and do-it-yourself media. "We're seeing the beginning of something," he adds.

While the Flash technology makes the site's performance comparable to desktop video-editing software, Jumpcut's capabilities are still somewhat limited. For instance, if you want to do more-advanced video processing, such as adjusting the lighting, you're going to need to use desktop software. But for now, Jumpcut is offering a combination of simple tools that appeal to a growing number of people. Folgner says that his team of programmers will continue to add features to make editing, sharing, organizing, and collaborating easier for Jumpcut users.

And as the video recording hardware improves, Folgner expects to see even more user-generated content. "Personal media shared online will explode in the next five years," he says, "which creates enormous opportunity for technologies that facilitate collaboration and creation."