Hey folks. Jumpcut has been nominated for the Webware 100. We’re excited about the nomination, so if you love making movies on Jumpcut, head over to the Webware 100 site and cast your vote. Thanks!

Hi everyone. We’re glad to see lots of new faces on the site recently - things have really picked up.

I know many of you have great ideas for how we could improve Jumpcut, so we’ve just launched a public suggestion board to gather feedback from the community. If there’s something that you’d really like to see on the site, let us know.

Here’s a link: http://feedback.yahoo.com/?prop=jumpcut

You can also vote for your favorite suggestions from other people.

Cheers,

-Byron

Hey everyone, as of this afternoon, we’re up and running on the Yahoo! sign-in system. Existing Jumpcut users will need to link their accounts with a Yahoo! ID. It’s a very simple process and you’ll be back on Jumpcut making movies before you know it. Of course, you’ll keep your old-school Jumpcut screenname.

Here’s a help post that explains the details: Yahoo! ID Migration FAQ

The Webby Awards celebrate the best of the web every year and Jumpcut has been nominated in three categories. Here’s the skinny:

Broadband - Sites fully integrating bandwidth-intensive interactive content
Services - Sites that enable real world activities online
Interactive Advertising - for the Doritos Crash The Superbowl campaign

In addition to official selections, the Webby Awards give out a “People’s Voice” award based on votes from people like you. Here’s what you need to do to cast your vote:

1. Go to pv.webbyawards.com and create an account.
2. Activate your account by clicking on the link in the email that they send you
3. To cast your vote in the Broadband category, click here
4. To cast your vote in the Services category, click here
5. To cast your vote in the Interactive Advertising category, click here

Thanks for your support!

Gwenny Zucko from Denver, Colorado won the voting round and was announced as the winner of TV Guide Channel’s America’s Next Producer Search Contest today. Watch her in the new reality TV series, “America’s Next Producer” coming to TV Guide Channel in July.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your patience. We got the blog up and running again so we can now announce the winners of the Snoop Dogg Horror Sweepstakes. The winners are MereMaiden’s HOH [Contest Entry] and Mariposa’s Snoop Dogg’s HOOD of HORROR. Congratulations!

We’re very pleased to announce that our latest release (code named PLAYA) is now live and ready for you to have fun with. We’ve significantly updated the look and feel of the site and we’ve added a bunch of new features. Here are the highlights:

Across the site…

• A completely new header with multi-word search built in
• Bigger, juicier thumbnails for movies, clips and photos
• Significant performance improvements
• The site is wider (960 vs. 760 pixels)

Uploading…

• Fixes to make upload much more reliable
• Significant enhancements to video quality
• You can now add your media to sets on upload

In The Editor…

• Created bigger clippers so it’s easier to trim your video (it’s no longer necessary to zoom in)
• Added a light grey indicator that shows you where you’ve placed titles and effects in the timeline
• Added the ability to edit titles and effects after you insert them into your movie
• Added an actions tab so you can easily take actions on multiple items (including applying styles, setting transitions, setting display duration for photos and sorting by date uploaded & file name)
• Created a Ken Burns effect for better slideshows
• Improved the stability of the Undo function

Playback…

• We made the player a lot smaller. The new dimensions for the embedded player are 408×324
• We fixed a number of issues that caused stuttering on playback
• If you’ve already loved a movie, the heart now says “Loved”
• We created a nicer “full” view. We think it’s a very elegant way to present your movies

Explore…

• A new main Explore section called “The Wall” that includes a Featured Movie, Recently Popular Movies and Active People
• An RSS feed for Recently Popular Movies
• New navigation for Exploring on the left side of the page

Groups…

• A new Groups page that displays Active groups and New Groups
• Views in the left-hand nav that let you see groups with the Most Movies and the Most Members
• Separate views for Events and Contests
• A new layout for the individual Group page
• The ability for moderators to specify a Featured Movie for their group
• New visibility and membership options for moderators
• RSS feeds for each group section

Your Personal Home…

• We greatly improved the recent activity section. It now shows a lot more relevant activity as well as the latest movie from your friends embedded right on the page. If you don’t have any friends yet, you see the most popular movie on the site
• Added a “More activity” page so you can see everything that’s happened in the last month
• Added a tag cloud that contains all of the tags on your media
• Added summary views of your Friends and Fans

Your Public Page (My Page)…

• Cleaned up the layout of the page
• Added a view to display all of your “Works in progress”
• Added a “View as slideshow” function to sets
• Added a date to sets so you can determine their sort order
• Added a link to your tag cloud

If you’d like to get your movie featured on the Wall, be sure you add a short description when you publish. We’re looking for movies that are short, fun to watch, and created on Jumpcut.

We’re very excited about this release and we’re looking forward to your feedback. If you have any difficulties with any of the new features, please send an email to support@jumpcut.com

Be good to your video.

Heads up everyone, we’ll be integrating with Yahoo! Registration in April, so you’ll need to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in once we make the switch. It should be a pretty painless process and you’ll be able to keep your Jumpcut screen name, as well as bragging rights for being old school.

We’ll send out more info in the near future, but for now, start thinking about which of your Yahoo! IDs you want to use to sign in to Jumpcut. If you already use one for Flickr, that would be a good choice.

Sorry folks . . we finished the migration as scheduled but our blog was out of commission, so we were unable to post any updates until now.

Everything went smoothly and Jumpcut is now running in a shiny new data center. We've made some performance improvements as well so the site should seem snappier than it has over the past few months. Our community is growing quickly and we're doing our best to keep up with the increased traffic. We also have a cool new release in the works that includes even more performance improvements as well as a new look and some great new features. Stay tuned.

We have seen some intermittent issues with Upload since the migration so let us know if you see any of the following issues:

1. Uploads not completing
2. Imports from Flickr & Facebook failing

Be sure to send an email to support@jumpcut.com if you have any trouble.

Thanks.

Hi folks. Tonight we’re moving our servers into a new data center so the site may be down for a little while. If you can’t get to Jumpcut right now, check back in a few hours and it should be back up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In the meantime, give our friends over at Flickr and Yahoo! Video a visit. They’ll be happy to see you I’m sure.

We’ll see you back on Jumpcut soon.