How to find the best meme videos before all your friends

Were you the last kid on your block to see Rebecca Black’s Friday video? Did it burn a bit when your friends said, “Yeah, man, that’s been out for, like, years” when you tried to show them Bed Intruder?

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If so, you might want to check out Unshared.tv. Instead of surfacing the most popular (a.k.a. “so five minutes ago”) clips à la YouTube, Unshared aims to be your own personal hipster, bringing you better, fresher clips based on a better set of indicators.

“Most sharing sites re-purpose shares or attempt to recommend related content,” said the Unshared founders in an email exchange with VentureBeat. “Unshared.TV is different: it is designed to recommend videos based on a wider range of publicly available information such as comments, thumbs up, likes, and shares.”

In other words, it’s able to show you what’s cooler much faster because, instead of just using YouTube data as a metric, Unshared also scrapes info from Facebook, Twitter, and other social sources. Then, the meme-tastic clips get packaged into an elegant iPad media player and decorated with a smattering of unobtrusive game mechanics (Unshared.tv users can accumulate awards to elevate their recommendation status).

“We’ve tried dozens of apps and couldn’t find one that comes close to the experience we wanted,” the Unshared team continued. “Right now, you have to work pretty hard to find a video that matches your taste.” Their response, they said, is a beautiful app that ensures you’ll never be the last person in your social circles to know about a really great video.

“We are not deceiving ourselves that we have cured a dreaded disease,” the team told us. “However, we do believe we have cracked the code, solved the problem — choose your metaphor — of finding great videos we want to watch that we otherwise would miss… There are millions and millions of professional, semi-professional and amateur videos available on video sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and more. However, users often miss really great masterpieces — work they might need to know about or just enjoy — simply because these videos are buried in tons of irrelevant content.”

Over the next year, the team will be building out user-requested features as well as mobile applications.

Unshared.tv was founded in September 2011. The startup has offices in Silicon Valley and Kiev, Ukraine. To date, the company has been self-funded but is now entertaining funding offers from various financial institutions.

Unshared.tv is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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Top image courtesy of Angela Waye, Shutterstock