Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Chill transformed from a Turntable.fm for video to a Pinterest for video when it launched its redesign last month. The startup completes its metamorphosis on Wednesday with a new ‘categories’ feature that looks suspiciously like Pinterest’s pinboards.

Now when you bookmark videos, you can sort them into categories of your choice. Chill co-founder Brian Norgard, for instance, has category pages for underwater cinematography, big wave surfing and nature time-lapse videos.

Other users can follow your specific category pages in order to see updates to them on their home boards. Previously they had a choice between following all of your updates or none of them.

If you’re at all familiar with Pinterest, you’ll recognize the system. Norgard acknowledges the similarities.

“Everywhere we go, there’s this Pinterest for video comparison, which isn’t all that inaccurate,” he tells Mashable. “But the reason we think it’s important is because the web has been so diffuse that eventually you need to move to a curational model. Algorithms are not going to solve everything.”

Chill isn’t alone in borrowing some design tips from the hot visual bookmarking startup. And the pinning system makes sense, especially for video.

YouTube users alone upload eight years of video every day, and many social video startups such as Shelby.TV, VHX and Squrl are trying to help sort them out. The visual model Chill has hit on might not stand apart from Pinterest, but it does stand out from the startup’s competitors in video.

This isn’t Chill’s first pivot. After beginning as a platform for discussions called Namesake, the startup decided to pursue a Turntable.fm for video in which “VJs” could earn points from others in the room for spinning YouTube videos. It then pursued social synchronous viewing of shows from sites such as Hulu, Vevo, Livestream, Ustream and Justin.tv. Viewers started watching the videos at the same time and participated in a conversation while it played.

All of the above features have now been deleted from the site.

We’re curious to see how the Pinterest model will serve Chill — and how long it will last.

 

In revolutionary times, it’s tempting to work to get things back to the way they were.

How often, exactly, does that plan actually work out the way you hoped?

I think it’s worth beginning a policy, strategy or tactical discussion that revolves around a choice between forward or back by saying, “We’d like to roll the market/technology/competitive landscape back to the way it used to be, even though it almost never works out that way. Here’s why it’s going to be different this time.”

A little bit of honesty goes a long way in helping you be realistic about how you’re going to spend your time. The good old days are old. That’s part of the deal.

I wonder if Jerry ever got jealous of acts that were able to put songs on the radio. (The Dead had exactly one hit record…)

I hope not. Jerry was in a different business. Sure, he played music. Elton John also plays music. But they were in different businesses, performing for different audiences, generating revenue in different ways, creating different sorts of art.

In a world filled with metrics and bestseller lists, it’s easy to decide that everyone is your competitor and easier still to worry about your rank. Worry all you want, but if it gets in the way of your art or starts changing your mission, it’s probably a mistake.

It used to be that the non-customers, passers-by and quiet critics of your venture were totally invisible to you. They drove by, or muttered under their breath or simply went to someone else. Now, all is visible. Just because you’re vividly aware of your shortcomings in market share doesn’t mean it’s important.

The next time you have a choice between chasing the charts (whichever charts you keep track of) and doing the work your customers crave, do the work instead.