You may have noticed that we’ve been beefing up social features on Revver.com recently. Offsite publishing tools like our customizable player are still a priority, but we’ve found that people want to hang around Revver.com too. Since we like having you, why not give you more and more to do while you’re here? Our latest addition makes it easier for you to see what other creators you’re interested in are up to.

We’ve broken up what were previously called “contacts” into “friends” and “subscribers.” Anyone who had added you as a contact is now a subscriber, and you are now subscribed to anyone you had added as a contact. Your subscribers see any new videos you upload in the subscriptions tab in their dashboard, and you see new videos from anyone you’ve subscribed to in your own subscriptions tab. This is a great way to round up all of the content that you want to watch when it’s hot off the presses. To subscribe to a Revver user, just click the subscribe button on a video watch page, or on the user’s profile.

If the subscription thing seems a little impersonal, and you’re actually interested in the creator and not just the content, you have the option of adding users as friends. Unlike subscriptions, friends are a two way street. You send someone a friend request, and they accept or ignore it. If they accept your friend request, both of you are alerted through a news feed when the other leaves a comment on a video, changes anything in his/her profile, or uploads a new video. You can also send messages back and forth to friends if you’re ready for that kind of thing. To send a friend request, just click the “add as a friend” button on the user’s profile page.

Everyone is starting off with zero friends, so don’t feel bad about that. If you’re nervous about your first request, Asi promises he’ll accept anyone.

Last year, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (responsible for the Daytime Emmys) honored web video for the first time. Not to be outdone, this year the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (note the lack of “national” in the title) is following suit and honoring broadband content (aka online video) at their 60th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. One organization presents the Emmys for daytime TV, the other for primetime, but both now recognize online video as the future of television, which is great news for all of us. The first deadline for submissions is April 7 — find out more about rules and eligibility requirements here. Good luck to you all, getting an Emmy would be huge!

It’s been a whole week since we released something new, so we thought it was time to snaz up the player. From now on, all embedded players will be fluorescent green and will come with a lolcats.tv logo. No, not really. Truth is, from now on players will look however you want them to look. We added a new preference page that allows you to change the color, size, logo, and menu options. You make the changes in your account, and any embed code you grab from Revver.com will display them.

The guys over at loadingreadyrun.com couldn’t even wait for us to announce it. They quickly ditched the default black color for their own Commodore 64 look, and the results are geekily gorgeous.

The sky is pretty much the limit. In fact, if you have a blog about the sky, you might like this:

But if you’re a video-blogging hot coal walker, this might be more your thing:

You get the point. We want your site to be yours completely, and that means you choose the look of the player. Just another part of our plan to be the best and creator-friendliest video site around.

We just made available an update to the Revver WordPress Plugin. Nothing major (and no amazing/embarrasing video to go along with it), but it offers more customization and greater support to users.

The plugin has always required that your host allow cURL access. Unfortunately for some users, certain hosting providers such as GoDaddy required additional configuration settings that would have required updating the plugin code. To remedy this, we added a field in the “Revver Configuration” tab where you can add a proxy server that does support cURL (sounds a little mumbo jumbo-y, but all you need to do is copy and paste a URL and you’re good). In the same tab, we also added an easy way for you to customize the size of the Flash player to fit different WordPress themes, and now offer a field for you to enter an image path to re-brand the player—the new logo will even stick with your player if someone grabs an embed code from your blog! A few more changes can be found through this tab, so check them out if you’re a WordPress user or want to be.

Instructions for installing for the first time or upgrading an existing install can be found on the quickstart guide page.

We just added a checkbox to the upload form for uploading videos to “offline” status. This allows you to upload time-specific videos early, and they will remain offline until you are good and ready to activate them. You can change a video’s status at any time from the video edit page.

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As the online video space has grown and evolved, creators have increasingly gained control over their work. Free hosting and the ability to embed video on one’s own site, being able to customize and white-label solutions, the flexibility of retaining ownership while licensing content for use under a variety of Creative Commons licenses — these are all things that have empowered independent creators and given them the opportunity to take the business of online video seriously.

This control, along with monetization — an element in which Revver has been a clear leader — has made it clear that creators can find success on their own, and part of the process has been that creators are no longer positioning big video distribution sites as the epicenters of their content. Rather, they’re distributing their videos and interacting with their audiences right from their own branded sites.

With this shift in mind, we’ve been hard at work on a video sharing solution that gives you all the best of Revver in your own environment, where you have full control over the presentation of your content and the community of people that rally around it. The result is the Revver WordPress Video Plugin, an easy-to-install tool that brings all the functionality of Revver (and then some) right to your WordPress blog. Whether you already use a WordPress blog to distribute your content, or you’re looking to get started with your own site, the Revver WordPress Video Plugin makes it easier than ever, and does a whole bunch of cool stuff:

• upload videos directly through your blog (+ auto-publish upon video approval!)
• manage your Revver account, videos, and subscribers — all from your blog
• enable video responses to your posts
• your subscribers are automatically given a Revver account when they sign up and post video responses — so they earn too!

In essence, the plugin brings an unprecedented level of convenience to your blog, allowing you to publish and track your content without ever requiring you to leave your site. On top of that, it’s a WordPress blog that you own - design it and trick it out to your heart’s content! And then of course there are perks for your subscribers — they can leave video responses and earn as Revver members just by subscribing to your blog. It’s your content, it’s your brand, and they’re your fans — why should anyone else own that but you?

Everything you need to know about downloading, installing, and using the plugin can be found here. Have fun!

Our buddy Nalts recently wrote about ugcDb.com in a post titled An IMDb for User-Generated Content. And, well, that pretty neatly sums up what ugcDb.com is. If you’re not familiar with IMDb.com, it’s the internet database for those somehow involved in the production of content for those other mediums (film and TV). Now, creators of online video have their very own database to showcase their various projects and accomplishments.

The coolest thing is that once you’ve added yourself to the database and added your Revver account, you can import any of your Revver videos right to your profile with the click of a button. The videos you choose to import are actually embedded on your profile, which means that ugcDb.com is another place where you can get your work seen and earn! Here’s my profile (a work in progress) — go add yourself and some videos!

The Webby Awards are famous for only allowing winners a five word acceptance speech (The Beastie Boys last year: “Can anyone fix my computer?”). They like brevity, it seems, but verbal paucity is out the window for their first conference, taking place in Laguna Beach, CA in early October.

WebbyConnect aims to gather the various components of the Web world into one interactive 3-day dialogue. The speaker list is stacked, and the location is gorgeous. From their website:

Having reinvented the awards show, The Webby Awards brings its trademark flair and style to the staid world of industry conferences. WebbyConnect will bring together Webby Award winners, Academy members, and leaders in fields such as entertainment, advertising, and politics for an exclusive, three-day gathering exploring and charting the future of the Internet and emerging media.

It’s a bit spendy, so this probably isn’t for the casual participant. But if you work in an internet related field, you can spend three days at California’s only 5-star resort and write it off when tax time comes.

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Our friends over at The Daily Reel recently launched REELEDin, which means your favorite site for all things online video now has a porn component á la Amp’d Mobile. Psych! Regardless of what you want it to be, REELEDin is not a porn site - it’s a niche social networking site for creators and producers of online video. Post your reel, network, search for jobs, get help with equipment, share your news on the community blog - there’s lots to do, so head on over and check it out!

We added a few new features to the site last night and we thought we should give you the skinny. First off, to go along with your gravatars, we’ve added a user description field to allow you to tell your viewers a little bit about yourself—SAT scores, how much you weigh, favorite NASCAR driver—whatever you want. There’s a 160 character limit, so if you’ve memorized pi you can only impress us to the 158th place. Add a description through “Account Preferences” and it will show up on your account page to the right of your avatar.

Next up is a way cool drag-and-drop manual collection ordering function. Previously, your manual collections could only be displayed in the order you added them, or the opposite of the order you added them. Now it’s however you want to do it. Just navigate to an existing manual collection through “My Collections,” click the pencil icon, move your videos up or down by clicking and dragging the arrow button, and save your changes. Your collection will then appear on the site and in widgets in the order that you’ve chosen.

The last new feature is a subscribe/podcast drop-down menu that allows you to subscribe to collections through a number of popular feed-readers with only a click—no pasting of URLs necessary. This option is available by mousing over the “Subscribe/Podcast” button in the upper right hand corner of any page displaying a collection. So if you want happyslip’s newest video to show up in your iTunes or Google Reader the moment it’s published, just click that button in the drop-down menu.

More is on the way so stay tuned!