Exlusive: uvlayer, a cool social rich media application

I have been playing with a very interesting AIR application recently called uvLayer. It's essentially a rich media dashboard that lets you manage video assets while sending them to friends or seeing what your friends are watching so you can check it out. They've wrapped a very engaging user interface around it and added some subtle UI tweaks that encourage interacting directly with the content as opposed to using menus or keyboard shortcuts.

uvLayer allows you to build collections of videos based on a search term. I've got one on mountaineering and one on Adobe. It goes out to YouTube and Truveo (with more on the way) and brings back all the video related to your search term. Once you have a collection you can do a number of things with it. You can use it as a playlist and watch all the videos all the way through (either right from the application or in an expanded full screen video mode) or you can share it with friends. This is where the application gets really fun.

uvLayer uses your Facebook account to find friends you have on the site. The close integration with Facebook means that you can get a community started very quickly. As your friends watch videos on the site you actually get updates of what they're doing (these updates can be turned off if you want). So as you're interacting with your own content, if your friend is watching something that looks interesting, you can quickly move to your activity feed and watch what they're watching. You can also very easily send content to your friends. Either individual videos or groups that you have created can just be dragged and dropped onto a friend's picture and they'll be sent your collection. You can also take any group or rich media asset and copy it as a URL which you can send via email or IM. When they click it they'll be brought to a web-based version with an option to download the AIR client.

uvLayer in action