The Slick Network

YouTube is to video like Flickr is to photos. YouTube.com , often mistakenly called uTube.com,  lets you upload up to 100 MB of video for FREE.  This is the newest in a long line of social networks that are exploding in popularity over the net.

What is YouTube? YouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. With YouTube you can:

1. Blog the videos you take with your digital camera or phone.
2. Share videos with family and friends.
3. Become an instant internet celebrity.
4. Create video podcasting segments.
5. Produce video how-to videos.
6. Create an internet based tv show.

This is very easy to use and very fun. YouTube is a free online video streaming service that allows users to view and share videos that have been uploaded by our members. Anyone can view and share videos, and members can upload videos and use other features, free of charge.

Watching videos on YouTube couldn’t be easier—just come to the site and browse around, or search for subjects that interest you. To save your favorites for later, you need to sign up as a member, and then click the ‘Add to Favorites’ link underneath the videos you want to watch later. You can also create playlists to group favorite videos toether into your own personal catogries.

Tags are keywords that describe videos. For example, a surfing video might be tagged with “surfing,” “water,” and “waves.” Users who enjoy watching surfing videos can then search for any of those terms and that video will pop up in their search results. Tags help you find new videos you might like to watch, and also help you label videos you upload so that other people can find them more easily. The bigger the tag appears in the list, the more videos use that tag.

     Most of the content on YouTube.com is worthless material,but sometimes you can find some very interesting video mixed in.  Just like any other service, you have to search for quality content.

     YouTube has taken some heat by networks for displaying copyrighted content.  I feel that they should just view it as free advertising for their programming.

 Update:  4/2/06

 YouTube.com has limited video content to 10 minutes because of fears having to deal with too much pirated content.  This makes it a much less attractive service than it once was…or does`it?  Video bloggers/podcasters will not like this new change, but the shorter segments may be more attractive to the A.D.D. generation. The shorter video segments will enable more unique content to reach the internet because it will allow give the non-professional segment of the internet to have a place to display creative videos on the net. Most segments above 10 minutes are usually pirated content. This could potentially be the next billion dollar idea or it could be the next internet bust.  Yahoo and Goodle may see this site as a gateway to the the social marketplace.

In additon to YouTube, you also have a service started by one of the creators of MySpace called Vsocial.com  .  Vsocial lets you post video content with no specified length limit.  Google video has updated and it now allows you to instantly upload and share video online.  Google Video had previously required that you upload a file and wait a few days for it to show up online.

 09/01/06 Update

YouTube has announced that it plans on making music videos available online in the near future.

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Tech, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.