Gabble screen shot.Google, meet Gabble.
Gabble is a new site from Hewlett-Packard that lets people post videos online. But unlike Google’s YouTube service, which is geared to sharing with the masses, only people invited to your Gabble group can view your videos.
H.P. thinks that its orientation toward privacy will appeal to families uncomfortable making their home videos public and to businesses that want to use videos as a collaboration tool.
Of course, you can tweak the privacy settings on YouTube or Facebook to do much the same thing. But H.P. says that defaulting to private videos makes life easier on the average person. Make of that argument what you will.
Gabble came out of H.P. Labs, where the project was previously known as Conversa. The online service remains in beta, and has only recently been opened up to the public at large.
Gabble is part of H.P.’s strategy of trying out a variety of online, cloudlike services as it hunts for a hit. “If they go viral and take off quickly, then we will support them,” said Shane Robison, H.P.’s chief technology officer, during a recent interview. “If they don’t, we’ll take them down pretty quickly.”
For example, H.P. fired up an online storage service called Upline in April 2008 and closed it down in February. Meanwhile, it’s still working on a vanity magazine publishing service called MagCloud.
Most of these services feed at least a pair of H.P.’s businesses. The video service, for example, could drive sales of networking and storage gear, while MagCloud primes H.P.’s printing and storage businesses.
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