Yoink’d Mediabox goes a ways beyond your standard video player; in addition to displaying clips, it lets you search for them and share playlists with others.  The Yoink’d product is quite new, though, and still needs some polishing.

First off, speed is an issue - every time I visited the Yoink’d homepage, Firefox slowed to a virtual crawl.  Then, although, Yoink’d’s search results turned up content fairly quickly, playback was quite spotty.  Webware’s Peter Butler had problems getting an embedded version of Yoink’d Mediabox to work at all.

On a more positive note, I was very impressed with the relevance of Yoink’d’s search results, which pull from different sites.  A query for “dog” returned a YouTube video of the famous skateboarding bulldog, a query for “system of a down” yielded the “B.Y.O.B.” music video, and a query for “lotus exige” came back with the Top Gear video I was hoping for.

Also, Yoink’d has an interesting idea in that playback doesn’t stop after just one video; it will simply move on to the next most relevant result.  Granted, you may want to intervene at some point, but this could save some clicking-around.

Above all else, the good news is that Yoink’d Mediabox is in beta.  Given a while longer to develop, this product may really win some fans.

Tags: Yoink'd, Online Video