If you hop over to vyou.com/new today you can see what the video Q&A site has been working on over the past few months. They are taking off the “beta” label and upgrading their look and functionality.
The service is launching a new design aimed at the tablet crowd, with a series of vertical columns you can swipe through. VYou’s chief marketing officer & evangelist extraordinaire Rex Sorgatz says the site design should now feel natural for iPad natives.
The service is also introducing a sort of Tumblr re-blog feature with the “re-ask”, which aims to spread questions across a wider network of users. Instead of having users submit questions directly to one another, the site now allows for open questions, more along the line of a Quora thread, which anybody can answer or share. Users can also comment on the questions without recording their own video response, which VYou hopes will up engagement.
The user who posed a question is now embedded in the same space as the video answer, making it simpler to track the conversation going on. And VYou amped up its discovery to let users better search for topics, users and branded channels from Daily Candy, Nickelodeon and NBC.
While a lot of these changes are focused on making VYou more engaging for the average user, Mr. Sorgatz says the site sees its business opportunities as a platform powering video Q&A for other sites. “Let’s say you’re on CNN reading about healthcare, there might be a prompt to record your response through VYou, and that footage becomes part of their overall coverage.”
