Earlier this year, we profiled ShowYou, the video discovery and sharing app with a distinctive grid-like interface that worked on all kinds of touch devices but reached its optimal form, not surprisingly, on the iPad.

As of today, ShowYou's Web Grids is now available by invitation on the web and the UI is closely aligned with that of the iPad version. Users can now share their whole grid (i.e. channel) of videos with friends, on the web.

“It’s a shift in strategy for us,” says ShowYou CEO Mark Hall.  “We’re using a mobile device to build a website, essentially.  We’re not inventing this notion, because there are entire companies out there (like Zapd) devoted just to that, but we are part of that trend.”

Under the hood, what is fueling this trend is the adoption of html5 with CSS. “Now we can try to recreate the elegance of the visual experience on the iPad for the web,” says Hall.

“Companies like ours are inverting the traditional model (of launching on the web and then adding in mobile). Instagram was one of the first,” he notes.

For ShowYou, the move to emphasize the web addresses a gap in the usage pattern noted by the company’s team.

Its iPad app is primarily being used for extended periods lasting more than a half hour on nights and weekends.

The iPhone version is used throughout the day for shorter sessions, where users watch maybe half as many videos as on the iPad.

“Now with Web Grids, we think it will help us cover that period when people are sitting at their desktop, maybe taking a break for lunch and checking out videos shared by their friends,” says Hall.

The Web Grids product works in any of the versions of browsers Chrome, Safari or Firefox updated in the past year or so. It’s not available in IE yet, which has tended to lag behind the more visually attuned browsers.