I am fascinated by Xtranormal. This company is pioneering one of the most remarkable trends in peer production: social entertainment.
Xtranormal is service that allows anyone to create an animated short. You chose the characters and the setting from a limited selection of scenes, and then you write the dialog. The company renders your text into various pre-created voices. Basic scenes are free, and you can customize your characters by paying for virtual items. Then, you share your video with your friends and the wider world at large. You have most certainly had someone send you one of these videos by now. The breakthrough video, I believe, was the “iPhone4 vs HTC Evo” video released in June of 2010 and viewed more than 11M times on YouTube, but by now you’ve probably seen at least ten of ‘em. Each one is better than the next.
Although it has been hard for me to get any real statistics on the company, there are more than 6,000 video results on YouTube related to “xtranormal”. The Xtranormal site itself boasts more than 9M projects created. I believe the company has unleashed a remarkable trend of individual creativity and is tapping into a very important part of us – our interest in expressing ourselves through stories and sharing them with friends. Some of the funniest web videos I have ever seen have come out of this site, including “Logic vs The Tea Party“, “Quantitative Easing Explained” (more than 3.8M views) and for you hockey players out there, “Life In The Beer League“.
One perhaps accidental feature of the service is that a few of the voices are innately funny. A combination of the diction, tone and natural flaws in text-to-speed technology produce genuinely funny partial mis-pronunciations and staggered speech patterns. These are now crossing over into our general culture. I have even seen a tee-shirt with a picture of the female character from the iPhone4 video, exclaiming “I don’t care.”
I presume many of these videos are being created by amateurs like us who have a story to tell and would like to use humor as a mechanism to do so. Xtranormal gives us the tools to unleash this form of storytelling. It’s as if they have given us the tools to become a political cartoonist, a general satirist, or an irreverent animator without any training. And because of social media, after creating one, we can instantly share it with our built in audience: our friends. From there, things can easily get shared and explode through the power of viral networking. I find this absolutely fascinating.