rocketboomdev:

In today’s age, we don’t judge books by their covers. We judge them by their thumbnails. We also judge videos, e-books, software, and people the same way. Engaging an audience demands engaging them visually, no matter the medium. Some of our peers in the online video community recently noted that Tumblr allows the display of thumbnails for YouTube embeds on their dashboard, but other popular video sites, such as Vimeo and Blip.tv, are currently left out from showcasing their user videos with a thumbnail image.

Rocketboom R&D, the development unit of the Rocketboom network, has created a simple solution: a browser add-on that allows Tumblr users to see any video’s known thumbnail in their Tumblr dashboard. There’s no platform favoritism; this enables nearly every other common video platform the ability for thumbnail display. The add-on was created using Mag.ma, our own video aggregation service, to do thumbnail lookups for numerous video platforms with our simple API methods. The results? Uniformity for Tumblr users and creative support for content creators.

Get your browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, and visit the Tumblr Video Thumbnails add-on page for information, installation help, and more. Special thanks to our friends at Vimeo, Blip.tv, and Wreck & Salvage for their testing and support.

This makes the video experience on Tumblr about 100 times better. In the past, most of the stuff I ended up actually clicking was Youtube, and now it’s mostly Vimeo and Blip. Before the thumbs, it was up to the re-blogger to accurately describe the video. Now the video speaks for itself, as it should.

Now we can watch our tasteful artsy fartsy Vimeo stuff alongside our glossy, scripted Blip stuff, alongside our gritty, random Youtube stuff.

Thanks Rocketbooms.