Much ado about YouTube

I frequent YouTube to search for clips from my past: music videos I've enjoyed years ago, portions of fave animated series like Transformers, and other movies I didn't pay enough attention to the first time around. I also enjoy viewing contemporary videos I haven't ever seen before, but I don't spend as much time on those.

Recently, I acquired a YouTube Director account, primarily because I needed to upload the >10-min. Advanced Snapshot Magic. I also customized my channel.

YouTube's a lot of fun, but I hope Google helps give them a good working-over soon, because some things really bug me:

• QuickLists don't appear to save across computers, even if I'm logged in as the same account on both.

• Favorites lists and other parts of the site are out-of-sync: numerous times, I've added a video as a Favorite and it didn't show up in my collection until months later.
• Also, you can't move videos out of your main "My Favorites"; you merely can copy them, and for the aformentioned reason, that's cluttered too. I wish they were a lot more sortable.
• Saving certain preferences are broken in my experience: for weeks, I've been trying to change my birthdate, and it doesn't work.
• You can't see a list of the recent comments you made on others' videos. I know adoption of this is comparatively rare, but Flickr does it beautifully.
• Videos are relatively low-quality, and are downsampled and can't retain a larger size (e.g., 640×480). This makes it impractical for tutorials and related materials which demand fine detail.
• Flash video processing can take hours. Times appear to vary depending on active queue, but seeing as how uploading a vid can take a long time in the first place, having an agonizing wait after the fact is even more masochistic.
• Search (Google's stronghold) is problematic: searching for "Vangelis" leads to partial matches not even containing the full word, like Chinese clips named "Xom Vang".
• Horribly annoying ads. Anyone who's seen the "YOU'VE WON A FREE* LAPTOP!" one knows what I'm talking about. :\ I can't imagine that being compatible with Google's values.
• On that tip, uneven graphic design is another problem: while the YouTube player looks very sleek and well-shaded, we have tabs that don't match other tabs! For instance, look at the "Related" tab to the right of a video, and compare its gradient look to the tab bar near the top of the screen.
• Too much comment spam/crap. All manner of nasty, useless trash in most long comment threads I come across.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head.

One amusing anecdote: I was the first to comment in the popular "Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years." video that the music sounded like Philip Glass' — it's by Carly Comando. You can find it if you can load the comments thread without getting an an internal server error. But my quotes can still be sourced here. I'm not alone! To compare, there used to a vid of Glass playing his original, very similar-sounding music, but alas, 'twas removed.

Another suggestion for YouTube: break comments up into dynamically-loading pages so you can flip through them without interrupting your video watching. And I do like to watch.

Tagged as: General, The Web