One of our primary philosophies with regards to Xplana.com is to avoid building technology components that already exist in a proven and robust manner on the Web. A good example of this philosophy is our principal method of managing video — YouTube. The challenge with our YouTube integration, however, much the same with other technologies we bring into our framework, is how to create a feel and workflow that feels seamless to product users.
Our approach to integrating mature products like YouTube allows us to support existing libraries of user content, and to focus our core development energies on what we do best — social learning.
In the case of YouTube, we want users to be able to bring existing YouTube videos into Xplana.com and to use those in their learning content — notes, albums, etc. We also want to provide users an effective tool and interface for uploading and tagging new videos. Through a deep, two-way integration with YouTube, we are able to leverage Google’s expertise in video and search and join it to our powerful learning framework.
This is our goal in every integration we design, and what we believe makes our product a unique framework for learning.