I'm a great fan of This Week in Google. This is one of the scariest episodes they've made though. It's Not Safe For Work - not because there's anything rude. Why? Because they quickly identify a huge problem brewing as YouTube tries to merge with Google Plus. It is heading for disaster. And if you are relying on YouTube for your income, that's bad news for creatives publishing regularly on the platform. And what with
Facebook doing strange things to filter out what your friends can see, this may be the cue for MySpace2.0.
Or something like it.
That would be an interesting video to watch if I had 1 hour 45 minutes to spare! I'm not a fan of netcasts when they have such a cavalier attitude to the amount of time they expect me to spend watching them. It particularly irks when there are broadcasting-esque gestures in the presentation like graphics and a dynamic presentation style encouraging me to stick around for the show, but then no effort to reign in the discussion.
ReplyDeleteHowever, on the topic in hand (and I have been listening to the discussion whilst writing this comment) YouTube is frustrating me at the moment; many years ago I switched off any attempt by Google to store my history, with the result that I don't have a "watched" history on YouTube either. However the most recent version of my YouTube homepage that I see when I sign in now has a whole set of videos that "viewers like you watched" cropping up before the videos from my subscriptions appear. These are nothing like the kind of videos that I watch, but I cannot change or remove these - the controls seem to take me back to my watched history which is empty.
These suggestions are such daft and inane videos that I'm really being put off signing into YouTube and am thinking of setting up a bunch of RSS feeds of my subscriptions for when I want to see what they are up to; I only need to sign into YT for uploading my own videos and looking at the analytics on these. But I'm still really bothered that they think I want to watch a certain type of video. If they based them on my subscriptions or the data they store for analytics from the sort of videos I really do watch they'd surely never post this sort of "suggested" video.
~~~~~~~~This bit is not a comment!~~~~~~~~~
I think you may have posted your home address in the "location" for this blog post. If I follow that link I can see a residential street in Holland in Google Maps. Perhaps you are okay with that, but I thought I'd mention it!