Splicd

I was doing this 30-day challenge where I tried to build one web tool a day, all in PHP. Everyone around me was chasing the next Facebook or Twitter and I figured if I just kept shipping, maybe one of them would catch on. Most of them didn’t.

Splicd was one that did. The problem it solved was simple. Someone sends you a YouTube link and says “skip to 4:30” but you end up watching the whole thing and missing the part they meant. Or you want to share a specific moment from a long video and there’s no clean way to do it. Splicd let you paste in a YouTube URL, set a start time and end time, and get back a permalink that plays just that segment.

The name comes from growing up in a studio, splicing together 16-track audio tapes for mixing. Cutting tape to isolate the right take, reassembling it to build a mix. Doing that with YouTube videos felt like the right analogy for the Web 2.0 era. Drop the ‘e’ because it’s 2008 and that’s what you do.

The entire thing is a single index.php that takes a YouTube ID, a start time, and an end time, and renders an embedded player that respects the range.

Lifehacker and CNET both covered it, and PopSiren on Revision3 did a full demo on the show. Watching someone on a video podcast walk through something you built in a day, a single PHP file, was a strange and good feeling.

At the time YouTube had no native way to link to a timestamp, let alone a range. The URL hash trick for start time came later. End times still aren’t a first-class feature. Splicd URLs looked like splicd.com/kx8Xb5VJulQ/23/47.

It was one of the first things I built that other people actually used without being asked to. That matters a lot when you are early in your career and trying to figure out if you can actually build things worth using.

YouTube eventually added native timestamp linking, which made Splicd redundant. I ended up selling splicd.com and the index.php that powered it.