The YouTube Lag Problem

The jerky, slow loading videos you’re trying to smoothly stream on YouTube aren’t only failing on your computer. Over the past 24 hours I’ve seen an increasing number of YouTube Lag complaints showing up in tweets, live commentary on ustream and other blogs. My YouTube experience has been less than stellar for the past several weeks. I’ve even Googled it a few times initially to make sure it wasn’t just a problem with my ISP.

Is this some sick joke Google is pulling on us? Where they place tons of new ads on, in, and around videos, then drop the quality of service through the floor? Is the $1.5M per day YouTube has been losing for the past year finally starting to put a dent in the cash chest?

Are you experiencing slowdowns with YouTube? Do you think this is a temporary problem or the start of the YouTube bubble burst?

YouTube Turns Down The Lights

After giving up on Hulu during one of my recent posts, I headed over to YouTube trying to find a good playlist to occupy my speakers over the next few hours. Once the first video began to play I noticed a new button near the top of the player. I moused over the button and a “Turn Down The Lights” message appeared and as I clicked it the page around the YouTube player turned to dark gray.

The difference a darker page makes is amazing! After I left the page and went to a different video the “turn down the lights” icon was gone. Apparently this optional icon is available for use for videos published by “director” class users (anyone can be a director) and Youtube Partners. You’re not likely to see the feature showing up on any of your favorite shorter clips anytime soon.

Turn Down The Lights in action:

It seems the pace of YouTube’s evolution may be increasing. I am noticing small changes almost every week this summer. It almost makes their site interesting again.

Is YouTube taking advantage of the recent negative feedback hulu users have been posting on their blogs and message boards by releasing new features at the height of user frustration on other networks? Does all this work by the YT engineers somehow tie in with a plan to decrease financial losses in the 2nd half of 2009? Will YouTube ever find ways to solve their revenue situation? Are sponsored videos going to add any significant revenue? Wait and see.

Facebook Buys FriendFeed

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed and the marriage is the biggest topic today across most social networks.  FriendFeed has been a great resource for many people, including me.

FriendFeed’s  simple interface allows members to combine all of their social feeds (facebook posts, tweets, blog posts, youtube activity, blip.fm, etc) into one single page.   The beauty of this is that you no longer have to visit 9 sites to see what your friends have posted.  You can check out their FriendFeed and immediately see all their activity on one screen.

Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted recently about his use and admiration of FriendFeed.  He stated the 4 primary FriendFeed senior execs will now work as senior Facebook engineers.  While fate of the other 8 employees is unclear, operations will continue as normal for now.

FriendFeed was started in October 2007 by Paul Bucheit, Jim Norris,  Bret Taylor and Sanjeev Singh; all from Google. Facebook investors include Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Microsoft and Millennium Technology Ventures.

Financial terms of this deal have not been released.

Twitter Becomes A Search Engine

Twitter’s updated front page now shows a giant search box with trending topics under it. Is this where Twitter’s cannonball into the pool last summer really starts to create a giant splash?

Now people can search results taken from content updated within the past 1 second. Twitter’s search algorithm is expected to evolve quickly (currently all results are served in chronological order). Advertisers are chomping at the bit to see what type of self-serve platform Twitter may be constructing.

The new look and feel should engage a few folks still sitting on the sidelines who never enjoyed or understood blogging, much less microblogging or nanoblogging)

AT&T BlueRoom and iPhones at Bonnaroo

AT&T BlueRoom featured great live performances this weekend from the scene of the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester Tennessee.   One unplanned gift AT&T gave Bonnaroo fans watching from home was multiple live video streams being webcast from the iPhones in the crowd.

As I write this article, a fan is broadcasting tonight’s live Phish show on his Ustream.tv Channel to over 4700 remote viewers. The viewers can “Tweet” in a side chat panel. Once submitted, each tweet is automatically tagged with #phish and the URL of the video feed, what great promotion.

Tweets, YouTube and Facebook mobile uploads from the crowd are overloading AT&Ts bandwidth between songs. This causes the video feed to get choppy momentarily, but once a new song starts the quality returns.  Enormous use of social media and blogging has lead some media to refer to this years even at “Bloggaroo 2009″.