So the hot new destination this week is YouTube, and I wanted to have a chance to spend some time with it before I posted on it. First impressions: I dig it. I've also been playing around with vimeo, and the sites are similar in that both tend to get billed as "the Flickr of video." I dig vimeo also, but there are a few things than set YouTube apart, and namely that its architecture is a lot more open.
You’re encouraged to link to your videos from your blog or website and they also provide code to embed your video in
a player on your own site (they even make a version for Myspace users).
They also provide a badge to display a pretty cool sidebar featuring your most recent videos on your own site. That
kind of openness fosters trust, in addition to providing a great deal of value to users who can host videos on YouTube
and gain all of the benefits of the community interaction there surrounding their content, but also get the value
addition of being able to display those videos to the already existing audience on their blog or website.
Both sites feature tagging, commenting, sharing and linking to friends, and both offer different ways of showing you
what’s hot and what’s worth watching. Both are cleanly designed and easy to use. My advice to vimeo would be to open up
as much of that content as possible to stay relevant in what will be a growing number of video sharing communities.
Update: Jay reminds me of something I meant to mention but forgot: YouTube does put a watermark on all the videos, which is obnoxious.
1. YouTube crushs vimeo feature and easy of use wise. The best part of YouTube being they re-encode all uploads into Flash video. I uploaded a 60MB WMV file ( http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=Hy10COYAkhI ) and once uploaded they re-encoded it into flash video in a couple minutes or so.
The one thing I thought YouTube was missing was instead of counting "Most Viewed" they should count the conversion rate of viewers to people who actually watched the whole video (a percentage which basically records the quality of the item). I don't remember what this is called but it nullifies the syndrom of the bigger getting bigger and the smaller staying small. I saw the example of this over at ( http://www.archive.org/about/help-batting.php ).
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Cellulaer