NAMES: Zach Klein, Jakob Lodwick | Vimeo, Connected Ventures
LATIN NAME: collaboratus bizzaro
AGE:23, 25

Vimeo.com evolved from a need to share video online. In 2004 Jakob Lodwick and his friends were staying in touch by sharing photos through Flickr.com. At that point there were no existing sites for distributing video, so Lodwick, who studied Information Technology at Rochester Institute of Technology’s New Media department, created a program for his personal website that made it easy to upload and share video. Eschewing short films, which can take months to produce, Lodwick’s interest has always been in video snapshots, which he describes as, “the little moments of real life that seem unremarkable at the time, but are fascinating to watch later. They happen when you’re spending time with friends, but they’re ephemeral and if you don’t capture them on video, they’re gone forever.”

Lodwick admits that his first attempt at the interface design “looked like it was from 1996.” Luckily, his best friend Zach Klein, who attended Wake Forest University in Studio Art concentrating in Photography and Digital Art, was there to help. Since they always considered it a side project—during the day they are partners in Connected Ventures (a company that runs websites including CollegeHumor, BustedTees and Defunker)—at first they limited Vimeo to a closed beta, for fear that it would use up the server bandwidth it shared with their other sites.

What started as a private group of friends sharing videos has now grown to an online community of almost 60,000. But to Lodwick and Klein, it still feels like a big group of friends. “We say around the office, ‘YouTube is like McDonald’s, and Vimeo is like a dinner party at your friend’s house.’ There are a lot of good videos that aren’t made to be seen by everyone, and Vimeo is where you would put them,” Klein explains. New privacy features are in the works that will allow users to specify exactly who can see their video clips. Klein and Lodwick are also looking at ways to make the site pro. table. While they say there will always be a free version of the site, they are considering a membership model like on Flickr.com, where users pay a small amount for extra storage space, a fee that the founders would use to hire a full-time developer to continue adding and improving functionality.

For now, Vimeo must weather the storm of money being tossed at YouTube and its 170-some imitators. “Ultimately, Jake and I are going to continue to run Vimeo like it’s our personal video site and hope there’s still 60,000 users when the let’s-build-a-video-sharing- site craze subsides,” says Klein. Isaac Gertman

(TOP): This is what visitors see at vimeo.com. Designers Zach Klein and Jakob Lodwick say, “We’ve embedded one of our favorite clips, which conveys the VIMEO brand perfectly.” At the bottom are the latest actions from visitors, updating real-time. “This demonstrates that VIMEO is a living thing, with real people, not just a catalog of video files,” they say. “There are quite a few other features we could cram on this page, but we’d rather not overwhelm new users.”