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Well, it was a good run. Twitter recently redesigned their home page and the link to the Common Craft video "Twitter in Plain English" has been removed. Here's the story of how it got there:

Back in February of 2008, I shared the video with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. After making a handshake deal, the video appeared via a "watch a video" link from Twitter.com.

 

Twitter decided to use the dotSUB player for the displaying the video, which enabled the video to be watched with subtitles in many languages.  The video has since been translated into 69 languages.  As of today, about 1.5 years later, that video has been viewed over 9.4 million times via the dotSUB linked from Twitter.com. 

The Twitter folks put a link along with the video to CommonCraft.com, which sent a lot of people in our direction. 

Now that the page has been redesigned, the link to the video and to Common Craft are no more. But we're not sad. We're so honored to have been a part of helping educate people about Twitter - a simple idea that's very hard to explain. In the end, Twitter helped raise the visibility of our work and the work of explainers in general. We heard many, many times "We want a video like you did for Twitter." Thanks to Biz, Ev and the Twitter team for giving Common Craft the opportunity to a part of an amazing trajectory.  We'll never forget it.

While the video isn't linked via on Twitter.com, it's obviously alive and well on CommonCraft.com. We recently published Twitter Search in Plain English as a follow on. 

It's true. Two years ago today, we posted our very first video, RSS in Plain English. We had no idea what we were doing, or how that video would transform our lives.

We had a tripod, camera and a whiteboard, and that was about. The video was lit with bedroom lamps and I was speaking directly into the microphone on the camera as I moved around the pieces of paper. The video was edited with Windows Movie Maker. It was inspired by a blog post from 2004 with the title "RSS Described in Plain English."

Of course, the technical quality of the video clearly shows that we had many, um, many opportunities to improve:

We posted it about 10pm on the night of the 23rd and by noon the next day it hit the front page of Digg, partially thanks to our first comment by Rob Cottingham, minutes after it was posted. We were both blown away by its popularity. Here are a couple of tweets from that day:

This blog post (which makes me smile) captured some of the initial buzz:

It's been 24 hours since the video was posted and we've seen 15,000+ page views, 800 Diggs , 350 Delicious bookmarks and 50 comments.

Of course, the big question for us became, can we do it again? Soon after we started work on our second video, Wikis in Plain English. Once that was complete, we started to feel confident that this was something we could do.

Looking back at the RSS video, it's a bit painful to see how rough it is compared to our work now. However, I'm struck that the roughness didn't matter. It was the message, the script, the communication that mattered far more than the bad lighting and sound. While we feel good about technical quality now, we still focus the majority of our attention on what made that first RSS video work: a simple and clear explanation.

A year ago today, I was writing the script for the video "Twitter in Plain English."  A year later, the video has over 2.6 million views, thanks to a bit of collaboration between a handful of companies. Here's how:

We decided to make "Twitter in Plain English" for the same reason we made "RSS in Plain English " - it was a concept with huge potential that needed a better explanation. We wanted people to understand a resource that we value.

Twitter, Inc. didn't hire us to create the video and had no creative input on the project.  However, I did share the video with Biz Stone and he saw opportunities.  We made a simple deal where they could use it on their site and we retained all rights, etc.

Around April of 2008, this button appeared on Twitter.com, linking visitors to the video and our web site.

 

We loaded the video to a few hosts, like YouTube, Vimeo and dotSUB. Twitter chose to use the video player from dotSUB.com.  If you're not aware of dotSUB, it's an amazing free service that enables any video to have subtitles in mutiple languages.  Twitter embedded the dotSUB player and the ball began to roll.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fast-forward to today and it's clear that the video has been a hit. Here's a graph of the daily views over the last year six months via dotSUB:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think it's interesting to see the "hockey stick" formation over the last couple of months.  My guess is that this is an indication of the growing number of people visiting Twitter.com.  2 million views on dotSUB are added to 600k on YouTube and 70k on Vimeo to get to 2.6 million overall views.

Michael Smolens, a friend and someone who founded dotSUB.com shared the stats this way, regarding the Twitter video on dotSUB:

The number of daily views is now at more than 30,000/day, up from 6,000/day 3 months ago.  It is now in 53 languages, and is embedded on 3,397 different URLs.

Thanks to dotSUB's free, volunteer-based subtitling service, the video can be embedded and viewed with subtitles in 53 languages, making it accessible globally.

What I love about this story is that it's a win-win that's not predicated directly upon making money.  We made the video on our own time.  Twitter chose to use a free video service that opened the video to a global audience.  Almost a year later, and Common Craft is getting a lot of referrals from Twitter.com and licensing deals, Twitter gets a video for explaining their service, dotSUB gets a perfect way to expose the value of their service and the people of the Web get a fun video that explains something that's difficult to understand. Win-win-win-win?

NOTE: In terms of our business model, Twitter is an exception, as we believe it is an exceptional product. At this stage in our evolution, I don't want to set the expectation that we will produce product-based videos on our own time.