I’ve fallen into a bit of a black hole of development these past few days. Usually, we’re pretty focused on bringing you guys new features, but this week I’ve dedicated way too much time to make an existing 23 Video feature bet…. Well, I was going to say ‘better’, but let’s settle for ‘different’ for now.

I’ve never loved how comments work on 23 Video. Feature-wise they’re pretty awesome — you’ll get three different kinds of spam-protection, content monitoring, post-editing, notifications and more. But comments on 23 Video and Visualblog have always felt — well — wrong. In fact, the comment feature on 23 Photo Sharing just feels better, so I wanted to duplicate some of that feeling. (And, I’ll admit it, add a few extra features just to have something to tell the PR people upstairs: “No no no, the code monkeys aren’t wasting time down here. We’re building the future!”)

After days of tweaking, I still only have a prototype. It does all the same stuff you’ll know from 23 Video: You’ll still be writing your name and email alongside the comment; there’s still different spam-protection mechanisms in the browser; and there’s still a spam filter on the back-end. You can still get notifications and you can still delete a comment after it’s been posted. I’ve removed comment editing though, and there’s no threading or quoting.

There’s some new goodies as well: To lessen the burden of handling spam, users are now asked to complete a captcha to submit a comment flagged by the spam filters. We’ll be displaying user icons from Gravatar alongside comments. And it integrates with Facebook Connect. So you can log in using Facebook to avoid filling in name and email, and you can post a comment to your wall on Facebook.

So far, it’s all just a prototype — none of these improvement have made it into 23 Video yet. Before we go that far, I wanted to ask you: How does the new comment form feel to you?

Try out The Comment Form Prototype and post your impressions here. (And please, please, please. Don’t just try to comment. Try to break it.)

Video drives traffic, and more traffic increases the number of webstore checkouts. This is, in short, the idea behind the newly launched WebTV station from Scandinavias largest online soccer store Unisport.

The main content is a featured Unisport show with a charismatic host who explores new soccer equipment like boots and balls with enthusiasm, historical facts and a critical eye to details. A combination which often spark great debates and discussions in the comments from an enthusiastic community of soccer fans. The Unisport team also plans to create product videos of all their products to improve the buying experience in their webstore.

(Video in danish)

“Our goal online has always been to entertain and inform our customers with news, stories, rumors and reviews of our latest or upcoming products. So video is a natural next step for us, because it grows an audience among our customers and increases traffic and activity on our website,” says Filip Domagala from Unisport.

Mobile videos reaches a young audience

Unisport made their first video experiments with Vimeo but quickly realised their needs for an alternative platform.

“Our viewers are between 7 and 17, so we love the iTunes integration and the fact that videos are available on mobiles. And on a more pragmatic level I’ll have to highlite the flatrate price policy,” says Filip Domagala, who’s looking forward to explore the video feedback included in 23 Video.

“Right now we have no idea whether our video has the right length or format. But with the playthrough percentage and the other 23 Video analytics tools we’ll now get feedback, so we know what works and what doesn’t. This gives us an opportunity to improve our productions,” says Filip Domagala.

As far as the soccer fans in 23 are concerned the analytics will reveal that the Unisport production team nailed it pretty damn well allready. But since our analytics tool can’t predict the number of plays just yet, I guess we have to wait a couple of month to see if we’re right.