Cull is Cool: Linden & Second Life Alum Launch Kickass Music Video Streaming Service - Get Closed Beta Invites Here!

I've been digging Cull.TV, a new online service which streams endless music videos for you in a cool way. GigaOM loves it too:

The site doesn’t just crawl the web for available videos, but has technology to discover semantic relationships between videos and delivers them based on a sense of “flow.” As a result, it’s able to combine its recommendation technology with human curation and editorial-based entertainment programming, enabling a set-it-and-forget-it atmosphere for end users.

End result, in my case: a playlist that includes Johnny Cash and The Heavy AND Massive Attack AND Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" (don't JUDGE) in more or less rapid succession, an awesomesauce-flavored playlist ideal for me (since after all, my social media behavior helped generate that list.)

But here's something GigaOM doesn't know but New World Notes readers will appreciate: Cull.TV is a project heavily inspired and fueled by innovation in and for Second Life. The founder, Katherine de Leon, was once known as Iridium Linden (who I wrote about here), and one of Cull's engineers is co-founder John Hurliman, who did great innovation on OpenSim for Intel, and as the SL avatar known as Eddie Stryker, was a driving force behind the first steps to open source Second Life's viewer code. (Both pictured above.)

Katherine tells me they brought other Lindens and Linden-powered inspiration with them to the Cull team:

"Linden Lab was one of the finest examples of human curation I've ever seen," as she puts it, "and I'm honored to have been a part of it. Of the Cull team, Adrian Herbez, Jesse Reiner, and I all worked together at Linden. And during my tenure there, I met my co-founder, John Hurliman, who was tackling some of the tougher scalable computing problems of his career working on the Second Life platform.

"Cull uses the same design principles found in large virtual world simulations to scale recommendations and real-time services, which are increasingly important for web applications. Our team's expertise in real-time simulation and game platforms gives Cull a tremendous advantage."

So there's that. There's also this: I have 500 special closed Beta invite codes, so you can try Cull for yourself. Just click this link to get one: http://cull.tv/join/hamletau

Now who's going to cull a Cull which culls the best Second Life music videos in their Cull?

Comments

[Roland Legrand]

awesome! thanks a lot...

[Melanie]

Yay, thank you!

[Porsupah Ree]

Looks quite interesting! I'll be exploring Cull properly over the weekend. First impressions seem good - easy signup, though without confirmation of the email address used, and seems to work as advertised. Sadly, it seems useless at the moment on an iPad, which is where I'd be most likely to use Cull - video playback's in slow motion, and the controls don't seem functional. Given that's not an issue with YouTube, Vimeo, et al, I'd hope that's something that'll be given attention in due course.

Thanks!

[Angie Mornington]

Watching a video with Stevie Wonder AND Ray Charles singing "Living for the City" live. That did it for me.

[Vampira Aristocrat]

Awesome! Thanks!

[Fran]

Excelente,sigo atentamente gracias por compartir.

[Ferd Frederix]

Looks cool, but I hate web sites that load eight (8) tracking javascripts from various places (NWN uses 9, but hey, it's you, Hamlet, so you get a pass.

It seems this site won't load at all when Facebook connect is off. I'm not personally concerned about my online privacy, and many people do need to sell ads and track their content, but it makes me wonder why it won't load without Facebook involved.

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