An anonymous reader writes "A new folksonomy website that seems to be catching on is YouTube, a service similar to Flickr, except that it is for sharing and hosting short video clips instead of photos. Like Flickr, its core functionality is implemented in Flash. Videos can be tagged, searched, discussed, etc through a social network. YouTube has developer APIs, RSS feeds, and the ability to embed videos directly into other web pages. The website was recently profiled on TechCrunch as an up-and-coming Web 2.0 application."Ads_xl=0;Ads_yl=0;Ads_xp='';Ads_yp='';Ads_xp1='';Ads_yp1='';Ads_par='';Ads_cnturl='';Ads_prf='page=article';Ads_channels='RON_P6_IMU';Ads_wrd='internet';Ads_kid=0;Ads_bid=0;Ads_sec=0; This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted. YouTube -- The Flickr of Video? Log in/Create an Account | Top | 90 comments | Search Discussion Display Options Threshold: -1: 90 comments 0: 89 comments 1: 70 comments 2: 44 comments 3: 11 comments 4: 4 comments 5: 2 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Pretty cool, but... (Score:1, Insightful) by Drew Curtis (904851) on Sunday August 14, @09:31AM (#13315793) (http://fark.com/) While it works well in Internet Explorer, I couldn't get videos to play in Firefox. In Opera, they started to play but after a few seconds it stops and wants to report a serious error to Microsoft. The second time I tried in Opera, it caused the screen to black out and rebooted my computer.Re:Pretty cool, but... by mysticwhiskey (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @09:38AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by listerine reborn (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @09:39AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by no_barcode (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @09:40AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by Fiznarp (Score:3) Sunday August 14, @09:40AMFirefox Works by ImaLamer (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @10:20AM1 reply beneath your current threshold.Re:Pretty cool, but... by justforaday (Score:3) Sunday August 14, @09:40AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by jp10558 (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @06:51PMRe:Pretty cool, but... by DanteLysin (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @09:48AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by Mattygfunk1 (Score:3) Sunday August 14, @10:13AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by koekepeer (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @11:42AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by DoorFrame (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @10:24AMRe:Pretty cool, but... by Taladar (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @10:48AMWorks in FF, and got my enhanced podcast to work. by lieumorrison (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @03:28PMRe:Pretty cool, but... by NanoGator (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @06:47PMNot it's not Microsoft... by tereshchenko (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @11:10AMRe:Not it's not Microsoft... by jp10558 (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @06:56PMRe:Pretty cool, but... by siliconjunkie (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @05:06PM2 replies beneath your current threshold. Would osmeone please be kind enough to explain... (Score:1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14, @09:38AM (#13315809) Would someone please be kind enough to explain how this site can be profitable or even break even for that matter. The bandwidth costs of a video site will NOT be offset by advertising revenue. I can't even believe that Flickr pays for itself through advertising.Anyone that can offer real insight, and not the usual Slashdot-know-it-all-speak, would be greatly appreciated. Re:Would osmeone please be kind enough to explain. (Score:5, Informative) by the_unknown_soldier (675161) on Sunday August 14, @09:46AM (#13315840) Sites like www.newgruonds.com turn a profit serving 4-5 meg movies to every single user based purely on advertising. It isn't pretty but it can be done. [ Parent Re:Would someone please be kind enough to explain. (Score:4, Informative) by Wonderkid (541329) on Sunday August 14, @09:48AM (#13315847) (http://www.fonebox.com/) Easy P Z, just like other hosted content services, they will eventually allow a limited number of free videos, but charge for larger quantities. I think it's a cool idea and well done. Worked fine for me using Safari on Mac OS Tiger 10.4.2. [ ParentRe:Would osmeone please be kind enough to explain. by arose (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @10:15AMRe:Would osmeone please be kind enough to explain. by dextroz (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @11:44AMRe:Would osmeone please be kind enough to explain. by NanoGator (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @07:02PM1 reply beneath your current threshold. Thank god... (Score:3, Funny) by InsideTheAsylum (836659) on Sunday August 14, @09:49AM (#13315850) That they're not calling it pod-viewing (although I assume eventually there will be something similar), videoblogging (although people already use that for other things), or something similar. It's a video om the net and that's all it is!Re:Thank god... by Yahweh Doesn't Exist (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @10:23AMRe:Thank god... by dnixon112 (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @10:31AMRe:Thank god... by Yahweh Doesn't Exist (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @10:51AMRe:Thank god... by uttaddmb (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @12:13PMRe:Thank god... by dnixon112 (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @06:24PM Flickr requires Flash? Really? (Score:5, Informative) by nile_list (812696) on Sunday August 14, @09:54AM (#13315856) (http://deadbox.ath.cx/) Actually, only the Organizr requires Flash. The Organizr is required to sort your photostream (all the images you've uploaded) into different sets as well as adding images from your photostream into the photo pools of groups you belong to. Of course, you can also use it to do other neat things, like mass-tagging images. But it is definitely not the "core functionality" - uploading, tagging, adding descriptions, browsing, adding tags and comments, etc, photos all do not require Flash. Have a nice day! =)Re:Flickr requires Flash? Really? by roxtar (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @11:02AMRe:Flickr requires Flash? Really? by Nevenmrgan (Score:3) Sunday August 14, @12:05PM1 reply beneath your current threshold. I Shall Wait (Score:1) by p0 (740290) on Sunday August 14, @09:56AM (#13315861) (http://primary0.blogspot.com/) ... until I see how they handle Slashdot! Why in Flash? (Score:2, Insightful) by John Seminal (698722) on Sunday August 14, @10:03AM (#13315878) (Last Journal: Saturday February 21, @09:07PM) I don't have Flash on my computer, and don't want it.At one point and time, I had the following on my computer:FlashReal Media PlayerQuicktime PlayerGod knows how many codecs, I lost track.DivX PlayerWinDVDOthers I forgot the name ofI needed all of those just so I could play video, since every website had its own different format. And my system was crawling at a slow when it loaded. When I looked at the system tray, it was filled with 15+ icons.So I got rid of them all. I got tired of keeping track of what program was calling home. I got tired of Flash loading into websites when I did not want the Flash (like ESPN). I think the final straw was the slashdot story saying how Flash was not secure, that programs could exploit it. I figure the less programs running on a computer, the more secure that computer is.Why can't everyone use one standard like MPEG? What is wrong with MPEG? It is perfect, anyone can play it, it does not require anything extra. The video quality of MPEG is better than any WMV or quicktime I have seen. And it does not require any downloads or special programs to play.Re:Why in Flash? by TubeSteak (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @10:13AMRe:Why in Flash? by Anonymous Writer (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @10:18AMRe:Why in Flash? by prichardson (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @12:16PMRe:Why in Flash? by Civil_Disobedient (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @12:44PMRe:Why in Flash? by HMC CS Major (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @01:49PMRe:Why in Flash? by Pixelmixer (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @03:42PMRe:Why in Flash? by maxume (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @03:49PMRe:Why in Flash? by ki85squared (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @04:41PMRe:Why in Flash? by NanoGator (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @07:08PMExactly by abandonment (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @06:00PM5 replies beneath your current threshold. Folksonomy? (Score:4, Informative) by frostman (302143) on Sunday August 14, @10:08AM (#13315892) (http://www.frostopolis.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday June 14, @08:01AM) Ah, blogospheric neologisms..."Folksonomy" apparently refers to keyword-based organization and tagging and such.Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.From the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]. Peeked Under the Hood (Score:2) by TubeSteak (669689) on Sunday August 14, @10:08AM (#13315893) (Last Journal: Tuesday May 10, @10:36AM) I took a peek under the hood of "player.swf" to see if they were streaming a wmv/qt/etcThe operative bit of code is this:file = "get_video.php?video_id=" + _root.video_id;So take whatever video_id you're looking at and paste it ontohttp://v3.youtube.com/get_video.php?video_id = instead of anything useful, I got a buttload of raw crap dumped in my browser window.Hopefully some other /.er can tell me what format its in.P.S. The site ran fine in FireFoxRe:Peeked Under the Hood by cherokee158 (Score:3) Sunday August 14, @10:33AMRe:Peeked Under the Hood by sandieman (Score:1) Monday August 15, @11:36AM1 reply beneath your current threshold. donning a new habit? (Score:2) by moviepig.com (745183) on Sunday August 14, @10:44AM (#13316025) (http://www.moviepig.com/) The service indeed seems to remove technical and convenience obstacles to clip-publishing... leaving the prognosticator's question of whether something like this could somehow make its way into the pantheon of lasting, widespread user habits (like weekend movies, or video games, or blogs, etc...)I watched two of its offerings: the zucchini-eating baby (which YouTube proffered), and the article's "all-time favorite", Matt Dances [youtube.com]. The latter did have a certain something, no doubt about it... but neither induced me to eMail my friends about it, nor to expand my weekly routine for more... Not the first.... (Score:3, Insightful) by lukewarmfusion (726141) on Sunday August 14, @10:45AM (#13316027) (http://www.slashdot.org/~lukewarmfusion/journal/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 02, @03:49PM) There are other sites doing this, though with different audiences, formats, etc.Vidiac.com [vidiac.com]PutFile.com [putfile.com]In my experience, the quality of the videos posted are often quite poor. The owners of the sites battle copyright issues constantly and risk being held responsible if their users post material illegally. Finally, the range of the audience affects the overall quality of the site. Videos that a 12-year-old finds funny may not be worth my time.Not all the criticisms apply to this particular site or to all uses of the site, but it's there.Re:Not the first.... by b0r1s (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @01:06PMRe:Not the first.... by Spydr (Score:1) Sunday August 14, @05:15PM Video of Air France Flight 358 crash on YouTube (Score:1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14, @10:58AM (#13316080) A few minutes after the crash of Air France 358 in Toronto, a YouTube user who lives in Toronto uploaded this footage of the smoldering wreckage. Apparently he just happened to drive by at the time, and was able to shoot this video from the freeway.You can hear the announcer on his car radio saying that spectators are running across the freeway to make videos of the crash with their cameras and cellphones.Under the video the YouTube user also provides a Google Maps link that shows precisely where the video was shot.http://www.youtube.com/?v=a0C5H9vjjN0 [youtube.com] or without ads.... (Score:2, Informative) by aleatorybug (635939) on Sunday August 14, @11:01AM (#13316087) there's Our Media [ourmedia.org] ("We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches."). &if you want to host your own site that lets people upload tagged video and dist via bit torrent, there's BroadcastMachine [participatoryculture.org]. Down with vowels (Score:1) by imsoclever (901691) on Sunday August 14, @11:47AM (#13316284) I'm happy they didn't follow Flickr's "fuck vowels" attitude or we could have ended up with something like YuTub or YoTbe or Tb www.vobbo.com (Score:1) by pixelranger (758512) on Sunday August 14, @11:52AM (#13316305) (http://www.pixelranger.com/) http://www.vobbo.com./ [www.vobbo.com] You can Record live video directly to sever (no upload required). Upload media (videos, images, audio) for later playback. Post entries via email (camera and video phones). Form communities, groups. Create your homepage using your own URL. Mark your messages as private so only your friends can see. My wife and I use it to show make/show videos of our baby to family all over the country. Flickr doesn't use flash (Score:2, Interesting) by aldeng (804728) on Sunday August 14, @11:59AM (#13316334) They switched over to DHTML a while back after people comlained. Video isn't Image (Score:2) by hey (83763) on Sunday August 14, @12:17PM (#13316406) (Last Journal: Tuesday March 12, @07:08AM) Videos aren't images. It takes way longer to watch even the shortest video than an image. Its much easier for an amateur to make a great photo than a great video. Etc. Of course, sharing videos on the net is inevitable but it'll be different in many nontechnical ways.Re:Video isn't Image by b0r1s (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @01:10PM Watch the Terms of Use for copyright ! (Score:1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14, @01:20PM (#13316641) Watch the Terms of Use:http://www.youtube.com/terms.php [youtube.com]Under section 4, it says:The content on the YouTube Website, including without limitation the text, software, graphics, photos, and videos ("Content"), is owned by or licensed to YouTube, subject to copyright and other intellectual property rights under United States Copyright Act, foreign laws, and international conventions. YouTube reserves all rights not expressly granted in and to the Website and the Content. Other than as expressly permitted, you may not engage in the unauthorized use, copying, or distribution of any of the Content. If you download or print a copy of the Content for personal use, you must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained therein. You may not otherwise reproduce, display, publicly perform, or distribute the Content in any way for any public or commercial purpose.Do you think this is fair ? Video vs. Photos (Score:2) by patternjuggler (738978) on Sunday August 14, @01:25PM (#13316670) (http://galacticnorth.blogspot.com/) I used to be more into video, and may get back into it when HD cameras are a little cheaper and when distribution over the internet is easier- but currently I find taking still pictures much more rewarding.The first thing wrong with video is that it has a default and sometimes fixed playback speed. Some players have fast forward and so forth but it is usually clunky to use, and some compression formats make scanning the video difficult. The result is most videos are very boring. With a bunch of pictures, it's very easy to move forward and backward at whatever speed I want, since most viewers understand that's what the user wants to do (although some shitty sites out there force a slideshow playback).It's much lower quality than a picture from a similarly priced device. I'd rather look at a high res series of photographs capturing a few frames of something in motion rather than a smooth but thumbnail-sized video of equivalent size.It presumes too much of what the viewer wants to see. A large photograph allows my eyes to scan to parts of interest at my leisure, a video typically reflects exactly what the person recording was interested in, flicking from thing to thing or over concentrated on something uninteresting to me personally.It requires much more skill to capture well. You have to hold the camera steady through out the entire video, not just for a fraction of a second to take a still picture. A poor photographer who shoots a lot of pictures will probably end up with a few that could pass off as nearly professional, but a crappily taken video stays crappy no matter what.Unless you set up a camera on a tripod, video taping something really removes you from the event because it requires constant attention on the tiny lcd screen rather than experiencing everything normally. To everyone else you don't even have a face, you're just a video camera. Taking a picture is a discrete event, inbetween you put the camera in your pocket or bag and are just experiencing everything normally again.It is more annoying to have your video taken than have your picture taken. There's something more respectable about someone taking pictures than taking video. Video will capture little annoying things about you that you dislike, the way you said something or some mannerism, but a picture is just a tiny slice.It's difficult and very time consuming to edit. And of course any editing is presumptuous of what the viewer would like to get out of the video. Editing with pictures is natural- just don't upload the pictures that turned out bad (and like I mentioned before, it's easy to skip over uninteresting pictures quickly).The file sizes are huge, unless quality and length is compromised. This makes video hard to share and distribute, over the internet or even in person. Everyone you know will probably hate you if you force them to sit through 30 minutes of vacation video, but if you let them flip through a book of pictures they're going to like it much more. Someone on the internet may invest very little time to look at some of my pictures [flickr.com], but it's doubtful anyone is going to download a video for ten minutes without a good reason (like the promise of female nudity, say, or the recommendation of a trustworthy blog).Perhaps many of these problems will be addressed eventually, sites like youtube may lead to some solutions (the flash playback seems awful- how do I save the video and send it to someone, burn it on a dvd, edit it into my own remix of various found videos?).Re:Video vs. Photos by buckhead_buddy (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @03:43PMRe:Video vs. Photos by patternjuggler (Score:2) Sunday August 14, @08:46PM Can All Of Us Really Become Vloggers? (Score:1) by cmplus (681254) on Sunday August 14, @03:59PM (#13317258) This wired article [wired.com] on vlogging highlighted a number of new video sites including one called RocketBoom [rocketboom.com]. RocketBoom's author, Amanda Congdon, puts up new video content everyday, Monday through Friday, and by all appearances does a great job. Each day is a separate html page providing quicktime, winmedia and torrent versions of her clips. A typical clip runs about 2-3 minutes and the .mov and .wmv files run about 20-30MB in size. To properly experience the site requires a good broadband connection, which I have. So far so good. But it begs the question: who's paying for all that server bandwidth? She solicits no donations, and seems to have survived the exposure wired.com gave her. Can sites like these truly be done inexpensively? If so, how? For the record, I have no affiliation with her, have never met her, but enthusiastically applaud her efforts. If it is indeed easy to acquire the resources, bandwidth and video production tools necessary to create quality vlog content my guess is we're probably seeing the beginning of a true internet paradigm shift. My gut tells me however, that's a big 'if.' I'll leave the question of whether we should or not for another day.1 reply beneath your current threshold. *cough* *cough* yea, we do that too. (Score:1) by StreetFire.net (850652) on Monday August 15, @12:10AM (#13319172) (http://www.vidiac.com/) FWIW I'm one the co-founders of http://vidiac.com/ [vidiac.com] Mentioned above by "lukewarmfusion", and yes we do offer a similar service, though we specialize in offering free video hosting branded under your website, and then let web site owners decide what sort of video content they want their portal to specialize in.I'll answer what questions I can that I've seen posted here.1.) Does advertising pay the bills? Yes, but it's very low margin unlike picture hosting and the like. There are many ways to make a living on this, from syndicating the best content to providing pay-per view for high end content. Our goal though will be to be able and pay back the content creators for their submissions "leveling the playing field" and allowing indie artist to make a living creating quality content.2.) Why Flash player? We're using Windows Media and are preparing to launch a Flash option. We're finding that the 20% of the population Windows Media doesn't reach is covered by Flash. There are no elegant solutions out there. I've seen some good Javaplayers like on2, but the problem becomes that sites like MySpace and Xanga limit their user's ability to post Java making embedding videos difficult. Our solution will be to offer both and let users pick what works for them. Real and Quicktime have their own pros and cons as well, but right now the most ubiquitous player is Flash7. With 15,000 videos submitted to our system since February though it's expensive to diversify into more than two formats (transcode time and storage)Right now we stand on an interesting convergence of cheap video editing software, inexpensive video recorders, cheap hard drive space and bandwidth that is starting to become affordable. I think you will see many new Video hosting portals cropping up in the comming year. Our Software is an "ASP-hosted" software solution that lets you create your own portal for your web site, and not to brag on ourselves too much, it's been a huge success. We're now streaming 370K videos a day to 50K people across 30 sites using our solution.Like any new communication format, it will go through it's trials and tribulations in the coming year, and I'm sure we'll see a lot of garbage, but I think we'll also see a lot of good come out of it. My Favorite example of that is Anthony Carlone who is Video-Blogging xBox games. He's very young, and right now his reviews are rough, but who's to say that he won't turn into his own "G4-television" channel in the future?http://xboxcountry.freevideoblog.com/ [freevideoblog.com]Anyhow I'm just happy that I'm playing some part of this, and every day I find it neat to see how our software is being used.Adam BruceVidiac.com2 replies beneath your current threshold. Re:And some of you would pay for this? (Score:2) by lukewarmfusion (726141) on Sunday August 14, @10:31AM (#13315970) (http://www.slashdot.org/~lukewarmfusion/journal/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 02, @03:49PM) Advertising.That's how you pay for public television, CNN.com news articles, and Slashdot. [ Parent Re:Porn (Score:1) by nick-less (307628) on Sunday August 14, @10:35AM (#13315989) (http://slashdot.org/) so how long until its flooded with porn do we think? one, maybe two weeks?ok, see you there next week... [ ParentRe:Porn by Blackneto (Score:1) Monday August 15, @07:38AM Re:And some of you would pay for this? (Score:2) by HMC CS Major (540987) on Sunday August 14, @01:51PM (#13316773) (http://www.vobbo.com/) Can you turn on the TV and watch a video of a new baby in the family?Can you turn on the TV and view a video message recorded for you by a girlfriend/boyfriend/mistress/etc thousands of miles away?Can you record yourself telling a joke and send it to your friends and family across the country?There are great uses for video blog [vobbo.com] services. [ Parent6 replies beneath your current threshold.