So, 4 years.

I’m still very, very happy to be working on VideoSift- I guess you can say it’s become my life’s work, for this decade at least. I’ve been reading a great book called The Black Swan. It’s about the inability to predict life-changing events- how some things just come completely out of left-field. VideoSift is my black swan.

We started the site at almost exactly the right time- though we didn’t know it. YouTube was getting popular but still hadn’t reached the mass-market yet. Did you know the VideoSift’s slogan used to be “The Best of Youtube and Google Video”? Back in 2006- that’s pretty much all there was.

I almost abandoned VideoSift before it started. In the months leading up to its launch, I was an avid participant in MetaFilter. To me, this was a community done right. A shared community culture with lot’s of interesting, quirky people. The idea behind VideoSift was always to apply this to a video site. I was working on VideoSift 1.0 - about a week away from launch- when I read about a new site had that had just been launched that seemed to be exactly what VideoSift wanted to be- a voting powered community based on embedded video. VideoSift was almost still-born.

But I’d been working pretty hard on the site- and decided to put it out there anyway. Amazingly enough VideoSift took off. The competitor that beat us to the market, VideoBomb languished, even though they had the “first mover” advantage. So, why is VideoSift still around 4 years down the road and going strong? It’s the people. Rather than focus on the videos themselves, we’ve always chosen to make this place about the people who come here. This was the ingredient of a good community site that I thought was most important – and I tried to bake it into VideoSift from the beginning.

It’s four years on now and I’ll be honest in saying that it’s getting harder to maintain that focus. Sometimes I fear that we’ve lost a bit of our magic. There are a lot more of us for one thing. Also, we’re not the nimble young community that we once were- in some ways we’re lumbered with the layers of culture, rules and etiquette that have accumulated. In what will be our 5th year, we will shake things up and strip off a few layers. We’ve reinvented ourselves a few times now- expect something like that to keep happening. We’ll always keep the focus on our members- but we don’t want to be afraid to change.

I’d like to thank the members that have contributed so much to making VideoSift a great community. The video fixers and the grim reapers of dead videos; The members who greet and help the new guys as the welcoming committee and the members who note the achievements of other members with congratulatory Sift Talk posts. I’m grateful for these people and everyone who makes VideoSift a great community first and the world’s best video site second.

So from @lucky760 (who is on holiday) and myself - Happy Siftiversary, and I hereby open up the celebrations and declare this a VideoSift holiday. The lounge is open to all logged in members for the next 24 hours. Join us.