The Google-owned YouTube site has been designed to encourage users to stay on the site for longer by promoting ‘channels’, a series of videos and clips chosen by a celebrity or user. The new site will also encourage users to share their ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ with their social network by integrating closely with Facebook.

Vimeo aims to take on its rival by improving the ‘discoverability’ on its site. Vimeo’s redesign, its first since 2007, has invested heavily in improving how users can find content. An enhanced newsfeed will also allow visitors to track specific words, or themes, similar to Facebook.

A key feature of the new Vimeo site is that it does not feature adverts on the video, unlike YouTube. Instead, Vimeo aims to put videos at the heart of its site reaffirming the sites original mission: ‘Vimeo was created by filmmakers and video creators who wanted to share their creative work, along with intimate personal moments of their everyday life.’

The site took Vimeo over a year to build and new employees were recruited specifically into web design jobs to help with the redesign. Marketwatch explains, ‘Vimeo rebuilt the site from the ground up using current programming languages and open web standards to deliver optimized site performance and easier, faster browsing. The cleaner code base allows for more rapid development so the team can release site updates and new features in less time’.

The website will have a battle on its hands, however, if it is going to seriously take on YouTube. The success of YouTube goes from strength to strength. Launched just 7 years ago this month, 60 hours of video is uploaded every minute to YouTube with a phenomenal four billion videos being watched every day worldwide.

Many businesses are keen to piggy back on the success of YouTube and engage its audience. From recruitment companies advertising IT jobs, to the launch of new makeup products, YouTube videos are key to many marketing campaigns.

Vimeo, however, is keen to stress its credentials as the ‘Freemium’ video sharing site and it is reluctant to being as commercial as YouTube. It remains to be seen if its more romantic approach does increase its number of views and achieve its Chief Executive’s aim of ‘meeting the needs of users both today and tomorrow’.

Now on Mondays I usually end up in Starbucks for a good couple of hours if not more due to my timetable usually I grab a coffee or two and sit in the corner. But alas today my tweeting and blogging was unexpectedly delayed for sometime as I struggled to connect.

Everything connected fine but I just couldn’t connect to the BTOpenZone login page to authenticate the session. After around 40 minutes, numerous connections and disconnections and even a reboot I twigged what could be the cause. I had configured OpenDNS last week.

It seems the BTOpenZone restricts all IPs & Domains unless its in their whitelist, and it would appear that OpenDNS’s servers aren’t lucky enough to be on the whitelist.

Which is a bit of a pain really, especially considering how popular OpenDNS is that I can’t seem to be able to use my choice of DNS resolution services while using the WiFi, surely they should have OpenDNS IP’s whitelisted?

Today I have again found myself in Starbucks and again, having irritations. Today with YouTube. It would appear YouTube.com has been blocked, nothing on the YouTube.com domain is loading and I can’t see any reason why the connection failure seems to be restricted just to the YouTube. This (as with many things) is rather irritating, particularly as I planned on watching the last few minutes of a talk by Eric Schmidt before heading to college for lessons, alas no. It was not to be.

This is merely a short rant of frustration at my wasted time… Thanks for reading.

YouTubeSocial.com is a nifty idea which solves the age old problem of sharing videos with friends online, and being able to follow it at the same time. This is a problem I can relate to a lot as I often find myself sharing a link and then struggling to watch it along with them and you end up spending most of you time checking what point each other is at in the video.

Initially I was slightly discouraged as the site seems to be fully flash which I tend to be slightly prejudice against as I generally take the view that if it can be done using JavaScript then it should be, although that’s a debate for another article.

Finding videos:

Finding videos in this is incredibly easy to use and works extremely well. Simply click “Find a Video” and search; videos are then displayed and clean and tidy format and just click the video to load it into the “YouTube Social” area to share with friends.

When sharing these videos with friends you can hold the “remote” and control exactly how and what your friends see, you can select the video pause, skip and change between videos which is shown to all your friends in real-time.

Sharing:

This site has really made sharing the links on Facebook very easy to do you can connect with Facebook and you chat/online contacts get loaded into the “friend dock” from there you can simple drag n drop the contacts and you are then given a message box with a pre-defined message to send to that person, this is sent via Facebook chat and provides a link for them to join in.

It also includes the general post to Facebook so you can share the link and tell everyone that you are hosting a “viewing party” for others to join in.

Irritatingly Twitter sharing isn’t yet possible however it does say that it’s coming soon. However I am not sure why it can’t be added right now as Twitter integration to post a simple status can easily be knocked out in a few minutes even if it is a simple link passing the status via the URL, it should be there.

The site also includes a basic chat for all users in the room, however it’s a very basic chat and has some privacy concerns if chatting with friends using it as there are no privacy controls for who can join your “viewing party”.

Irritations:

I don’t particularly like people coming to my parties unless I want them there so I’d very much like to see some kind of invite only option as well as the ability for the person with remote to give the boot to unwanted guests.

Legal Issues:

Unfortunately it seems YouTube/Google have taken issue with the use of their trademarks and are currently perusing SocialVision the company behind the site to remove the YouTube logo, find a new domain and give them the “YouTubeSocial.com” domain name.

While I understand YouTube’s view on this, however it is slightly disappointing from a users perspective as this is a great idea and something I’d like to see Google purchase and incorporate into YouTube itself or alternatively develop as a side project as with Google backing it can become a fantastic feature. Although it seems unlikely and no doubt because SocialVision is small they will eventually have to give into Googles will.

I came across a very interesting page on YouTube the other day which provides some incredible statistics for you’re video speeds when using YouTube.

This provides some fantastically geeky data, you can see your average video speed over the past month (while using YouTube), compare your average to others in your location, country and the rest of the world.

Being on VirginMedia and with a respectable 20Mbit connection, I’m quite a bit above average. Aren’t I cool with my fast internetz?

Another great feature of this page is a “Test video” which shows you all of the connection information and speed while you watch a video, the video has many qualities from 320 right up to 720 and you can see some advanced details such as total Kbps transferring, and detailed frame information including how many frames were dropped.

Obviously this doesn’t serverany particular benefits other than an interesting insight into your connection and relationship speed wise with YouTube. Also to note, this is (obviously) based off your IP address, so if you are one of the unfortunate people with a dynamic IP address, or one which resets regularly this will represent minimal relevance to your actual usage.

Still worth a look, check it out at www.youtube.com/my_speed

So I noticed a shiny new feature the other day on YouTube, the ability to pop out the video or to “Watch this video in new window” on certain videos.

Now so far the only video I have come across using this feature is a 1:05:37 long talk from Vint Cerf  and amazingly, I have yet to find a bug… and there’s only 1 improvement i would like to see at the moment.

So on videos using the feature you see a little TV shaped square with an arrow pointing into the top right corner right next to the Turn Down the Lights button.

When you click this it pauses the video on the main page and loads the video in the pop-up as you can see below.

This seems to work pretty well and is a nice little idea, but it can be taken further, now i have been watching this hour long talk and i want to watch the video in a new window after 20 minutes and the pop-up opens and starts playing from the beginning, which isn’t a massive deal but it would be a lot easier if it resumed from where you were watching, like BBC iPlayer can.

I was checking out the shows on YouTube now to see if they had any others since i last looked, and i immediately see Britain’s got Talent…

I live in Britain. This is a British show. Shown on British TV. Why the F#!? isn’t it available on YouTube in Britain… I mean come on! Are you Sh!ttin’ me?!

And yes… I am submitting this to Fail Blog.

So much for me watching Susan Boyle again and again… guess will have to just watch all the clips uploaded without permission of the show eh… instead of the version which YouTube can put specially targeted high quality high return ads on.

Well done YouTube. Nice one.

Well i have been on and off YouTube all day and finally seen a mention about the TV shows and Films which are supposed to come in and take over normal videos and all this crap… and YouTube just tweeted about they blog post on the matter so i thought i would check it out and share with you my views, however as its almost 4am I will leave that till the morning… but i will leave you with a few thoughts on the new Beta layout for the user page.

Beta Profile Layout/Design

First off this morning on my twitter i saw Alan (fallofautumndistro) was chatting about the new Beta profile layouts (i naturally activated mine and you can take a look here)

As you can see its a totally different look and puts a lot more focus on the users videos themselves. This in my view is a good thing, and YouTube have said in their blog post about the new channel design, that it does need more work and new features are on the way soon hopefully.

Personally I’m hoping the upcoming features include more usability and interactivity with the videos themselves i would love to be able to do everything i can on the normal video page on the user page as well, thus enabling the page to “channel” all that users content to you without having to leap frog back and forth between videos and users channel which never made sense to me…

Btw, Don’t worry about opting in to using the new Beta design, YouTube save everything about your current profile design so you can easily revert back if you don’t like things!

I really am blogging too much about YouTube… noticed this earlier where on the “Spotlight” (that’s the feature page for any one who understands logic) and they have a “promoted” video which was covering up half the thumb nails!!

Now obviously this is because they changed the ad format size and added the box bit below the video, but surely this should have been noticed?

Yet more proof that YouTube don’t properly check their site before making changes, which while this is all good for smaller even medium to large size sites YouTube which is one of the largest sites in the world, a site which uses MORE bandwidth than the WHOLE of the Internet used in 2000. This is a BIG site owned by one of the largest companies i history and yet they can do basic things to provide a professional looking website…

I really do use YouTube way too much, and I can’t actually remember the last time i blogged something which wasn’t YouTube related, mostly mess ups admittedly and this post is no different…

So was just browsing around looking at videos subscribing to way too many people as usual and then the YouTube logo was randomly showing in the share area…

So I’m not quite sure what exactly happened there, so naturally first thought – I shall blog this and the beloved print screen was taken and is now shown above, i refreshed a few moments later and it was gone.

Now i have to be honest, I’m not sure why this happened, it could have just been FireFox being a bit weird and not correctly loading the CSS image sprite or maybe someone was playing with the design at YouTube? who knows (well someone at YouTube i guess) just amused me.

Which is why i decided to blog it at 4am in the morning when i really should get some sleep.

O well, Night x

P.S I think I will create a YouTube category for all these posts, they deserve it!