YouTube Wants You To Sit, Stay
I have a big problem with YouTube as a video server (which it basically is). The only reason I use YouTube as opposed to Blip.tv and others is thanks to TubeMogul (which recently added some features, congrats, Brett!). Tubemogul lets you simultaneously upload one video to several different destinations, and even tracks views on those destinations, so that you can log into ONE site and manage your online videos. Thrilling and completely useful.
YouTube has easily the biggest library of video content, we all know that. My issue with YouTube, though, is that it doesn’t provide feeds. Yes, feeds. I have several YouTube users/accounts that I like to follow. Friends, websites that upload videos, and others. I’m also becoming more and more mobile, and don’t really care to sit in front of my computer exploring videos for hours. Sure, my N95 has several ways in which I can view YouTube’s videos (no thanks to the site’s poor pace of converting all of its videos into a mobile-friendly format), but they’re all assuming I want to sit and explore videos on my mobile.
Am I the only one who doesn’t spend a few hours a day aimlessly wandering from video to video on this site? I can ‘subscribe’ to my favorite users, to get all their updates, but I can only SEE their updates when I login on my desktop. Take Flickr, for instance. I have a feed in my RSS reader that aggregates all of my contacts in Flickr, and feeds me whatever photos they upload. I can view this feed in a podcasting app (I don’t, cause it’s too many) or in Google Reader. It’s brilliant. I can’t do the same thing on YouTube. In order to find out what new videos my contacts have uploaded to YouTube, I have to actually go to YouTube.com.
Why can’t YouTube give me a way to only get a stream of videos that I want to get? How great would it be to setup a keyword-feed in YouTube, so that you open your Podcasting application of choice and have a selection of the newest videos tagged with that keyword? Even better, I’d like to get this feed on my MOBILE podcasting application. Every other site it seems is encouraging me to take my internet experience on the road. Go mobile. YouTube says ‘no, sit right there. Don’t move. Stay.’
