Tuesday, February 15, 2011

HOW TO: Turn Your Facebook Profile Photo Into a Video


Some Facebook users — myself formerly among them — are obsessive profile tweakers. We edit our list of interests. We reorganize our photo albums and experiment with awesome profile photo hacks. We weigh carefully whether we want to “Like” this Page or that, because we wonder how that information will be inferred. And we’re always just a little bit, well, bored with our profiles.

Enter FlipYourProfile, a new Facebook app slash browser plugin that allows you to replace your profile photo with a video. That’s right. You no longer have to have a boring still image in your profile photo box. You can have a moving, breathing, sound-generating profile video on loop.

The app was built by Cisco and DDB Singapore as a way of promoting the former’s line of Flip video cameras.

The application has two catches: First, only those who have the plugin installed will be able to see your video, otherwise they’ll just see your regular Facebook profile photo. Thus, if you want your friends to see your new profile video, you’ll need to persuade them to install it (and perhaps upload a video to their own profiles as well). Secondly, an ad saying, “Amazing! You can post videos on your Facebook profile. Get the app to view my profile vid,” will be automatically posted to your wall should you decide to upload a video, which is rather annoying.

Still interested? Follow these four steps to upload your own Facebook profile video.
  1. Go to facebook.com/FlipSG and download the browser plugin for Chrome, Safari, Firefox or IE.
  2. Restart your browser.
  3. Connect your profile with the app.
  4. Shoot and send video by e-mailing a video from your Flip Video cam to me@flipyourprofile.com, or by using the Profile Maker to shoot a video using your webcam or to upload an existing video (less than 10MB, .flv, .mp4, h.264 only).*
*Note: If you’re using, for example, your iPhone to shoot video, you’ll need to use a free file converter like Get Miro to convert your .mov file to one of the compatible formats. You should also shoot your video in horizontal mode; otherwise, it will appear sideways on your profile.
Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

7 comments:

  1. I can't imagine this not taking off.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Plugin required. Boo.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tweaks and features that require a non-default app or plug-in are meaningless to me. So for the hundreds of my facebook friends that do not have the plugin??? ... my profile probably looks the same as it ever did. Or worse - a FlipSG logo for my profile picture... awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  4. They'll see your regular photo if they don't have the plugin.

    If enough people download the plugin (i.e. it goes viral), of course, then most people would be able to see it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Is it down just for me or everyone ?
    Or maybe facebook just killed the tab because they consider the app is not respecting the facebook guidelines...
    Any clues ?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Would this work on business pages? If it does it is very interesting for brands and artists.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Awesome another thing I cannot do with my Ipad, and another thing I cannot see with my iPad...even better.

    ReplyDelete

Copyright © 2011 techstreak.