OK, so we wrote the headline of this blog post to be a bit alliterative.  Nevertheless, we’re quite happy to release a new feature that has really helped people have more control over the content they post to Gawkk: Our new post preview function.

Now, when posting a video to Gawkk, you’ll see a “preview” button that allows you to edit the details of the video, if it’s a new video to the site.  When you click “preview,” you’ll get the edit screen shown above, which also allows you to click on the thumbnail to select a new one through our Google image search overlay, as shown below.

We’ve already seen a nice increase in the quality of the posts made to Gawkk since releasing this feature two weeks ago.  Let us know if you have additional ideas or thoughts on how to streamline or improve the posting process.

At first it might look like just a small improvement but we think it’s a big deal.  That’s right, we’ve restructured our navigational header to include the search box in a more prominent location.  Gawkk allows you to search millions of videos, along with our channels and members, so we thought we should highlight that fact and make it more accessible.

In addition, we’ve also included links to our channel browsing page that make it easy to discover channels within popular categories such as News, TV shows, Music and Movies.  Please take a minute to explore these areas when you get a chance!

Whoa!  Looks like our suggested following feature has been working a little too well, as we’ve been seeing some of our suggested members wondering how they got so many followers on Gawkk.

We recently sent an email out to all of our suggested members.  Here’s the email update:

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Dear Gawkk Member,

You may have noticed that more people are following you on Gawkk and that you’re now getting emails about these new followings.  We’ve seen some tweets about this activity and wanted to address the issue to let you know what’s going on.

Last week, we introduced a suggested members and channels area at http://www.gawkk.com/setup/suggestions. We selected you as a suggested user because your activity on Gawkk seemed interesting, even if you haven’t visited us in a while.  Since then, most new members signing up have followed our suggested members and channels, so you probably now have several hundred followers.  These are all real people who each chose to follow you from the suggested users list, but we were not notifying you of these new follows.

Yesterday (May 26) we turned on follow notification emails for suggested members.  The default setting was to send a separate email for each new follow, but we have since changed it so that the default is now a single email once a day listing all new follows in one email. You can also now update your email settings for new follow notices at http://www.gawkk.com/settings/email/

We hope that this explanation is helpful and that you’re happy being a suggested member to follow on Gawkk.  We look forward to seeing more of your great likes and comments about the videos on the site.  If you’re still somehow concerned about being a suggested member, just email me back and we can easily remove your listing and place another Gawkk member on the suggested list in your place.

Thanks again for using Gawkk!

Gary & Thomas

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We hope this helps everyone understand this new feature, and we look forward to more great activity from the Gawkk community!

We’re now live with the ability for you to sign in to Gawkk with either your Twitter or Facebook account!  Thanks to the technical wizardry of @tsmango you can now sign up for Gawkk with just one click.  OK, we’ll admit that it takes more than one click to finalize things, but it’s still a lot easier and things like your avatar picture are automatically included.

If you already have a Gawkk account, you can continue to login with it.  You can still cross-post your Gawkk activity from an existing Gawkk account to Twitter, although we will be updating the cross posting features to use OAuth and Facebook connect in the future as well.

Enjoy!

Gawkk has been launching a number of enhancements and improvements, almost daily.  Our recent improvements include a fancy new signup (and login) overlay that allows you to easily create a Gawkk account.  We’ll be adding support soon for Twitter and Facebook Connect to make it even easier to use Gawkk.

This new overlay also allows us to expose more of our functionality to users who are new to the site, including the “What are you watching?” post box.  Visitors can now interact with nearly the entire site and signin only when needed for a specific action.

We think the new signin overlay will make it even easier to get to know Gawkk.

We just launched some neat updates to our activity feed that allow you to see more of what people are doing on the site.  Here’s the list of improvements:

• See Votes up and down: You’ll now know when your friends like or dislike a video.
• View everyone’s activity: Simply select “Everyone” on the home page activity stream to see what the whole Gawkk community it up to.
• Get friends-of-friends activity: When viewing a friend’s profile, simply click the Activity tab and navigate by friend to see what they’re doing.
• Read all comments: You can now view all of the comments on the site from the View All link on the “Recent Comments” section on the home page.

We think you’ll definitely notice and use these subtle updates as you get deeper into the Gawkk community.  Enjoy!

We’ve just released a new version of our video source importer that will update a channel automatically.  While we check our video source feeds periodically, ranging from every few hours to every few days for slower sources, we wanted to provide the most current videos for rapidly updated video sources.

Here’s how it works: When you view a video channel, we’ll automatically start updating the channel as you browse it.  If we find additional videos, we’ll notify you at the top of the channel page.  Simply refresh the channel to see the new videos, which will be added to the front of the channel at page one of the listings.

Enjoy!

We’ve just upgraded our search function on the site to allow for a unified search experience across all channels, members and videos at the same time.  In addition, we now also search all of the videos at YouTube for matching videos as well.

To get started, simply use the search box in the upper right hand corner of every page.

Enjoy!

We’ve recently added a new RSS feed that will allow you to see new channels added to Gawkk.  The RSS feed icon is located on the right hand side of the “Featured Channels” section at the top of the home page.

Subscribe to this new “Recently Added Channels” RSS feed in your favorite news reader and be the first to know about every great channel that’s added to Gawkk!

You can also check out our RSS Feeds page to learn more about RSS.

As you know, Gawkk allows you to save videos from anywhere on the web to your own channel.  You can now grab our updated “Save to Gawkk” browser button (also called a “bookmarklet”) to make submitting videos to Gawkk even easier!

Simply grab the button and add it to your browser.  Then, whenever you see a great video on the web, just click the button and you’ll be able to add the video to your Gawkk channel.

After submitting a video, you’ll even be directed right back to where you came from.