Navigating YouTube: Video "Social Organization" Trumps Video Search
Yesterday I spent the first three quarters of the day reading all the way through my Attention Economy texts and found only that I'm unsatisfied overall with Goldhaber's thinking and Goldstein's uncritical toadying (he does have clever ideas such as Vault which I'm currently using).

YouTube's New Personal Profile Pages
To blow off the steam of not knowing quite how to manage my disapointment in the "attention economy" I spent the last quarter of the day fooling around with YouTube's new social networking profile addition. Given my new status as an SEM viral video star, I felt it an appropriate use of company time.

When I mentioned YouTube's personal profile development to Adam Schultz, he immediately had me go read his recent post on Yahoo's new video uploading service. And he swore Yahoo was doing the same thing.

Power of Video Social Network
They're not actually, and YouTube's contribution is, for my purposes, far superior. My purposes being to watch smart, funny, creative videos.

The reason being that in YouTube now I can find other like minded folks and:

a) subscribe to the videos they create themselves
b) subscribe to the videos they find excellent and add to their "channels"
c) find random videos I like, see who uploaded them and see what else this person has created or subscribed to

It's far simpler for me to find videos that I like in the collections of people who have made or aggregated other videos I like.

I'm not sure how *mainstream search* could *ever* deliver that experience.

In this video-discovery-through-social-navigation format I find a similarity in POWER to Amazon's book or video recommendations (which in my recent MMOG book buying spree had me pull out the credit card 5 times instead of 2...)

Pretty Sweet, Overall
I've long decried YouTube's search and longed for a video social network for this emerging 3 minute video form.

This, my friends, is it.

As it as it's going to be for awhile I think, until DVR and network television enters (without restraint) the social video distribution space (read Google As Interactive TV Social Network? for my incredible and amazing thoughts from 2 months ago).

NBC + YouTube = Crazy Delicious
On that note it's interesting to read NBC Battles, and Joins With, Video Web Sites from the WSJ today. It chronic-what-cles NBC's about face in regards to video sites such as YouTube and Bolt.

Especially note that:

NBC won't put its logo on many of the video clips it provides to YouTube to ensure the clips retain the illicit look that makes them cool.

(don't get me started on *THIS* ;)

While this is a far cry from PCs in the living room + video/entertainment social network it's certainly a step in that direction.

YouTube vs. MySpace Video
YouTube is better than MySpace Video because it's focused on the act of watching video. MySpace is focused on pea-cockery and the advancement of social levels by "befriending" people.

There is a strong contingent of indie musicians on MySpace too, to be fair. This too has been a big draw for MySpace.

*That* said, I can get more entertainment for time spent on YouTube right now, and feel that I'm more likely to find videos that appeal to me there than on MySpace.

YouTube vs. Yahoo My Studio
Don't make me laugh.

Here's my YouTube profile: http://www.youtube.com/user/GarrettFrench
Here's my Yahoo Video profile: http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?yid=nastybiggarrett

Yahoo gives NONE of the options that enable me and others to share favorites the way YouTube does (that's actually not true. I thought it was at the time of writing this because even after fooling with the favorites I could find no simple way to display to others what I thought was good). From the PURCHASERS OF DELICIOUS I find this RIDICULOUS. The only way users can *discover* on Yahoo right now is on the video home page and through search (and through the uploads of similar minded people... still there's something critical missing that makes me like YouTube way more. Maybe just because I'm so used to MySpace. Sorry for this disjointed and contradictory section).

This is likely to change (there ARE favorites in Yahoo video and Adam says sharing is possible through rss feeds), but for now YouTube rules.

Notable YouTube Profiles
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=bambifrancisco
http://www.youtube.com/user/GarrettFrench

Coming soon on MarketerToday
As I've built my profile on YouTube I've been doing LOTS of thinking about this emerging video format and discovered some interesting YouTube uses. Plus I have an email interview out with the guys doing Puppet Tom.

These pieces will be appearing on MarketerToday and I'll link from this post when they're up. You might want to subscribe at MT too ;)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |