We’re happy to announce that Hictu, the first video micro blogging service launched on June 2007, has been released today with a new and improved version 2.0.

This new Hictu brings a ton of new features to end users plus a major restyling aimed to improve the overall user experience of the “video conversation”. A main video strip has been added on top of the main page where different videos from different Hictuans appear randomly.

In addition to that, we think that with Hictu it’s very important that any user could see it in a different way and use it according to their feelings. For this reason, there are different Hictu home pages, representing different ways to see Hictu and to use it.

For example, Hictu can become your speaker’s corner as well as a way to declare your darkest vices or brightest passions, or maybe to tell the world your view about the meaning of life… what does really matter for you? Tell us through a video on Hictu and look at people who join the conversation and leave video comments to your video. It’s gonna be fun.

Speaking about features, we would like to give you a brief overview on what’s new here. First of all, the posting interface has been optimized and you can now easily choose what kind of post you want to publish, whether it’s text only, audio, video from your webcam or a video taken from YouTube or Google Video.

In addition, the mood has been added. You can reinforce your post with a nice icon representing you mood, something related to important concepts like “rich presence”, additional information on your status, more than the post only.

Features like the Twitter cross-posting and the Jajah calling capability are always there. You can easily configure those services from the “Settings” tab. You can also import your Twitter friends and send them messages directly from within Hictu.

An interesting feature is the ability to add video comments to your blog or website. You can configure and customize your Hictu widget from the Widget tab and insert the generated code directly on your site. People will be able to write comments, post videos and so on, even if they are not registered to Hictu.

A new specific plugin for Wordpress is available too, in order to make the integration with the most popular blogging platform as easy as possible. Think of leaving realtime video comments as well as YouTube or Google videos. You will face a completely new experience and definitely expand the audience of the conversations taking place on your blog, since everything will be public on a specific channel on Hictu too. This means that also people not visiting your blog can join the conversation and their comments will appear on your blog too (for those who are familiar with that, something similar to what happens with services like disqus). Expect bugs… But we will solve them immediately

This is how the conversation looks like on Lucafiligheddu.com blog posts:

and here the same on Hictu:

We were forgetting: to join Hictu 2, you need to get an invite from people who are already registered. Sign up is currently closed and will be kept closed for now. If you need an invite, just leave a comment to this post and I’ll send you one.

Do you want more and you are a developer? A comprehensive set of APIs is now available to developers to integrate Hictu in 3rd party services or applications. You can post videos from other applications or even create mobile applications to send videos directly to your Hictu account. To get more information, just send an email to [email protected].

Another important thing, the last one, something that I really care, is that Hictu has been built by a bunch of engineers and developers that we are very proud of