Remember what a revelation it was to be able to attach photos to your emails? Suddenly, our daily connections to friends and relatives got richer. Now it's finally happening with video. But we get ahead of ourselves.

Just a few short years ago, home movies were made with 8mm film cameras. Shoot film of the annual Christmas gathering, or take out-of-focus shots of your family mugging for the camera at Disneyworld, bore your friends and relatives with it once or twice, and resign the reels to a cardboard box in the attic. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the results were less than satisfying. During this entire period, the idea of making movies had mostly to do with archiving our lives, the way we archive them in photo albums. Maybe we could look at them in our golden years, and then pass them on to the children.

Things began to change with the advent of the consumer video camera. Now, instead of setting up a projector and projection screen, you could watch your movies on TV. Still, any thoughts of editing the video, which was an essential step in making it watchable, were usually quashed by the complexity of available editing software. Still, you needed to assemble a room full of pigeons, who were expected to offer great praise, and keep their eye-rolling to themselves.

The revolution accelerated a bit as consumer-oriented edting software became easier to use, and as camcorders became ever smaller, to the point of video functions being incorporated into cell phones. The great advantage was that they could be put in your pocket, and they were available for the unusual happenstance -- a few seconds of the cat riding on the dog's back, or maybe even of catching a crime in progress. The picture quality was lousy, but there was enough convenience to capture those spontaneous moments, and send them off to your friends or your local TV station. These were mostly very short videos, a few seconds or a couple of minutes in length.

Then along came the Flip. Here was a camcorder no bigger than your cell phone that actually took quite decent video. Certainly, the quality was good enough for YouTube -- another invention that began to change the way we see and use video. You could shoot a video, painlessly transfer it to your computer, make quick edits with automatically-installed, easy to comprehend software, and upload it to YouTube, all in a few minutes time. Send links to the videos to your friends and family in the email. Now email, a revolution of its own, could incorporate rich media -- photos and video -- to visually communicate the occurrences of our day-to-day lives.

With the advent of the Flip HD cameras, and with YouTube displaying them in wide-screen, high definition format, an ever-growing number of people are knitting their lives closer together through the medium of video. The importance of consumer video has expanded, beyond archiving our life stories, to visually communicating our lives as they unfold.

NEXT: Using Flip Video with Facebook, Twitter, and Flip Channels (members only)