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A Grand Unified Theory of YouTube and MySpace
Ant writes "Paul Boutin's Slate article explains the factors contributing to the success YouTube and MySpace: they are easy to use (usability), and they don't 'tell you what to do.'" From the article: "Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0, that hypothetical next-generation Internet where people contribute as easily as they consume. Even self-described late adopters like New York editor Kurt Andersen recognize that that by letting everyone contribute, these sites have reached a critical mass where 'a real network effect has kicked in.'"
Once myspace lets those kids design their own sites with their own colors (namely black on black) it sort of defeats the purpose of the site. I guess there isnt a way it could be fixed though.
^Tetris is so unrealistic.^
I
isn't described by what the interface looks like or how easy it is to use.
Everybody knows myspace is just a place to get laid
-gjr
"They are easy to use (usability), and they don't 'tell you what to do.'"
Which is one of the main reasons I hate MySpace. Aside from it being slow, I loathe that it is so easy to customise. It means that every person can mess up the CSS and HTML and destroy the look and feel of the site. By not telling people what to do they all run off and do things I that damage the site.
Of course, they all think their own page with a flashing bright backgroud, three different audio tracks playing, and text that blends into the every other item to make it unreadable is just beautiful.
...teenage girls
OMG!!1! ponies!!!1!!
Web 2.0: A website's value increases with the number of users creating content on it
Web 3.0: A website's value increases with the quality of the content being created
I like the whole concept of websites providing a framework where people create their own content and network, but the quality for most of these is terrible. I can only look at so many pictures of half naked drunk teenagers before I get sick of it. Hopefully the next iteration of the web will find some way to weed out the quality content (isn't that the reason we read Slashdot?) and provide more of that.
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
all the websites on myspace look like crap..
it is just the new geocities combined with one of those social network sites.
I am sure they make good money on ads..
if I see a company with a mission statement that talks about giving stuff away, lots of venture capital and no product then I will really belive that bubble2.0 has arrived..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
The prosecution rests.
Was this the problem the whole time? We gave users the tools to create their own individual sites, when really they just all wanted to conform to the same one?
Business / Internet video
Clip culture
Apr 27th 2006 | SAN MATEO
From The Economist print edition
A start-up shows big media and mighty Google how to do web video
CHAD HURLEY and Steve Chen, two modest twenty-something software geeks in Silicon Valley, were at a dinner party last year where several people brought their camcorders and then complained how difficult it was to share home videos online. So they did what one does in their circles. They founded a company, called YouTube; got a few million dollars from Sequoia Capital, an eminent venture-capital firm; wrote some code in Mr Hurley’s garage; and then moved into a San Mateo loft that resembles an office. Their simple idea was to make uploading home videos to the internet easy.
It turns out that millions of people already had such videos and were just waiting for a way to share them. Even before YouTube’s official launch last December, the site contained more than a million short video clips. In December people were uploading 8,000 clips a day, and watching 3m a day. This month they were uploading 35,000 a day and watching 40m a day. With such amazing growth—almost all by word of mouth, e-mail and hyperlink—YouTube already has four times the traffic of Google Video, the online video market of the world’s largest search-engine firm, and the nearest thing to a rival.
YouTube’s success is therefore of great interest to many older and larger companies. Web video has over the past year become the next “next big thing” on the internet. A survey by the Online Publishers Association in February found that 69% of American internet users have watched video on the web, 24% do so at least once a week, and 5% every day. Almost every big internet company, from portals such as Yahoo! to retailers like Amazon, now has plans to offer video search and feeds. The traditional media companies—owners of video libraries—are interested too. Walt Disney is about to make several shows from its ABC television network available without charge (ie, with advertising) on a new web cinema. CBS already offers some of its shows online for 99 cents.
This may appeal to younger audiences, since it allows “time-shifting”, so that viewers can watch when it suits them, as opposed to when the show is on air. Apple Computer was the first to understand this—it struck a deal with Walt Disney last autumn to provide some television shows on iTunes, its online music store, so that people can put them onto their iPods.
But the success of YouTube points to another development. People are spending an average of 15 minutes on the site during each visit, enough to view several short, funny clips. This is because they are using YouTube for little breaks during a dull workday. And it is a “lean-forward” experience, as people sit in front of computer screens. This “clip culture”, as Mr Hurley calls it, is quite different from the “lean-back” experience of enjoying a half-hour show while reclining on the sofa. So different that YouTube sees Hollywood as a potential ally, rather than as a threat. For instance, the producers of “Lucky Number Slevin”, a new film with Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu and Bruce Willis, are marketing it by making the first eight minutes exclusively available as a clip on YouTube.
This emerging clip culture is also a supply-side phenomenon. Only 10% of the clips on YouTube are from film-industry “professionals”, says Mr Chen. About 80% come from rank amateurs, and another 10% from “dedicated amateurs”, such as young comedians hoping to use internet celebrity as a way into a career. Unlike the big media companies looking to recycle their film libraries, Goog
Then we should credit Andy Warhol as the father of "Web 2.0". I'm not a huge fan of his art, but I think this prediction accurately sums up such diverse phenomena as MySpace, YouTube, Bubb Rubb, reality TV, American Idol, and All Your Base. Whodathunk we'd actually see this come to pass?
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
I didn't finish the article because I got bored after the first page.
I am soooo sick of hearing about "Web 2.0". Allow me to assist the Slashdotting public in understanding the definition of "Web 2.0":
/rant
rant
Web 2.0 (noun, currently, wait until next week when marketing people start using it as a verb) - definition 1 - the underlying goal of the Internet as it is now finally understood by marketing majors (12 years after it first began getting popular) who never studied in college and now need a term to throw around. Thank you, masters of the obvious.
- definition 2 - Marketing term invented by group without any real technical knowledge (who did not study in school) to reflect the type of technology that frameworks such as AJAX are now offering. Note, there was never a "Web 1.5" when flash first came out because the marketing majors were still "playing catch up".
hey are easy to use (usability)
I feel this is the single most important factor in any software design be it applications, games, websites, etc... However, I have a myspace site and I find it cumbersome. Editing different things on the page are in different places. It really feels like something a programmer threw together and not something that was designed with usability in mind.
I come from a HTML background. Customizing MySpace has not been easy for me.
I am not sure, but I believe that is why there are programs out there that will do it for you. If it was so easy to customize, I doubt there would be a market for middleware design apps.
As for youtube, it is easy and straight forward. I would not call that usability, but it's just as good in my book.
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
Parent is right, 5 out of 6 of the past dates I have had have been with girls I met through myspace.
Q: What's something kids love that's ugly, bloated, slow, and constantly goes down on them?
A: Michael Jackson!
Uh, I mean, MySpace!!
Sony ha
Flash.
Can someone explain the YouTube business model? It neither directly charges its users nor sells ad space, and streaming video takes a ton of storage and bandwidth. How are they keeping it up?
I'm not using myspace, nor I ever will. But that reminds me of google pages.
:)
Just today my wife complained that she had no easy way of publishing photos of our two small dughters (2 year old, and 1 month old) since I turned down my websever and never found time to bring it back up. Quick thought about google pages, and I logged her with her gmail account. She created a webpage with drag'n'drop in just three minutes and she was in hurry, because she was just leaving for a bus. Before she left I could give URL to some of my friends. I was amazed at how google pages were easy to use.
She is not a techie
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
"Just because you can open your mouth doesn't necessarily mean that you should"
;)
You could describe the whole of the web that way. Freedom is a two-way street.
So someone wants to personalise something, to make a little corner of the web their own. Well, think about the early personal web-pages thrown up over 10 years ago. A lot of them were butt-ugly and a lot of them still are, including a lot of commercial sites!
As always, there's no accounting for taste.
Essentially, TFA says that myspace/youtube have been successfull because they allow the user to make whatever kind of horrendous looking website they want to at the touch of a button. Personally, I don't think that myspace's popularity has so much to do with accessability as the current popularity of "blogging."
I must have been asleep in the class where we went over the 'textbook definition of Web 2.0'.
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Sounds like TagWorld.
I don't know - they must be doing something right, even if it does look like vomit...
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Did you get that out of the textbook?
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TFA: Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0
Anybody know where I can get a copy of this textbook?
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
"they don't 'tell you what to do.
/. doesn't "tell you what to do", but you get modded down if you post in bold ALL CAPS and you LOL too much. LOL! On myspace, you get +3 cool points for choosing a retarded colour scheme with broken CSS, and on YouTube you get thousands of video views for posting "OMG guy gets hit IN THE BALLS! LOL!" or badly cut south park excerpts.
More like, you p0st t0 t3h int3rw3b without being labled a noob.
Like all lowest common denominators, these mainstream websites require no real thought, effort, consideration or engagement. It's nothing to do with the internet, it's everything to do with people.
The guys that created MySpace are brilliant. No amount of trashing the pages the people using the MySpace service create, can ever match that brilliance. So don't even spew trash is what I'd do ;)
myspace appeals to the lowest common denominator of the internet populace; thus it's popular.
According to my extensive research, MySpace can be described by a non-abelian gauge theory with special unitary group SU(CK). Most of its pages are homeomorphic to terrible Geocities pages from 1997. Chromodynamic theories suggest that unlike the red, green, and blue of quarks, the colors of a MySpace page are limited to fluorescent pink, black, and a text color whose hue is optimized to minizime contrast with the background. An currently unresolved question is whether every page on my space is invariant under an embedded Mike Jones song.
Are the reason that Myspace and Youtube are successful. All they care about is meeting people, chatting away and sharing photos (and the blokes just want to hit on the girls.) And much like in real life, people congregate towards a central place that is free, available and simple to use.
:)
Myspace is the carpark of the internet, and YouTube is the cinema
£5.99 domain registration/transfer: the cheapest in Europe
myspace is 'contributing' much. I mean, its all good if I want to know what 14 year old thinks brad pitt is hot or whatever, but as far as contributing to the intellectual community of the internet... well, I think calling myspace a glorified AOL would be pretty sufficient.
Just so you guys know.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
It means that every person can mess up the CSS and HTML and destroy the look and feel of the site.
Aesthetics aside, the point of MySpace isn't to have a site with millions of users, it's to have a millions of sites linked to each other by users and friends. Your criticism is analogous to criticizing the personal sites on university servers for not having a consistent look and feel.
MyTubeSpace4You?
it was called "the internet"
and noone told you how to host "pages"
and all the pages were ugly (just like myspace is).
and people were free to link to each other and etc...
except now... some corporation controls the server, and telecom companies make it hard (in their service agreements) to host your own servers.
myspace is "neat" because it propagates the web to the masses, but really, this "tech" of publishing your own stuff has been around for many many years.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
the textbook definition of Web 2.0, that hypothetical next-generation Internet where people contribute as easily as they consume.
I thought that was the 1.0 part. And then the 1.5 came, with ads and spyware and spam and phishing. I thought 2.0 would be more like 1.5, only prettier and buildt on asynchronous use of some markup language.
Just the other day I was web2.0ing and I noticed - hey, this stuff works just like web 1.0 - but there's more nounal verbification. And that's when the truth hit me: web2.0 is really web1.0 - but with more words!
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I don't understand something... We slashdotters are complaining because more people are on the internet, doing things they like? Or is it just becuase we hate the idea of non-tech people on "our" internet?
Seriously, if you don't like somebody's page that badly then GTFO the page, or HELP THEM build a site that they may be WANTING but lack the time and energy to learn HTML+XML+CSS(1&2)+AJAX+JAVASCRIPT. I mean choose one or the other and quit bitching. Shit you could even charge a small amount for it ($20 for a design of the myspace page or $20/hour for people that can afford a TLD). I'm sure if your design skills are good enough they would be happy to compensate you a fair amount and would thank you, then guess what, they send out a word-of-mouth message to their 2,000 "friends" and you get a shit load of referrals. A new business anyone?
We bitch about "teh xtians"/"teh busybodies" encroaching upon violence in video games (or anything else in this vein), saying things like "If you don't like violence in videogames then RESEARCH the game and figure out if you want your kid playing it". But OTOH we say things like "These people just need to get off my internet because their design skills suck" or "There are too many ads". IT'S AN AD SUPPORTED WEBSITE, if you don't like the ads then get fricken Adblock or Opera. I regularly surf MySpace AND YouTube, and see NO ads. I also hate some of people's pages, because they can get annoying but I rarely bitch about it. BECAUSE I HAVE A BACK BUTTON IN ALL THREE OF MY BROWSERS!
Hell, if you hate it bad enough setup a proxy and block myspace.com or setup the Google search bar in Firefox to add "-myspace" to all searches.
Please, because I'm tired of hearing goddamn generalizations like "Everybody on Myspace is a complete moron" and nobody offering to help fix the root problem of ignorance of web standards.
As a Post Script... I have a myspace page that is neither annoying nor badly designed... http://myspace.com/jijinmachina
Flamebait and offtopic! I guess the world is not yet ready for my Grand Unified Pronoun Theory.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
youhavespaceinmytube.com... or maybe spacemytube.com or even my_space_your_tube.com?
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
MySpace is amazing, if you are in a band, or interested in non-mainstream music.
It is a quick and easy way to hook into a social network. For consumers of music, it is a great way to find interesting bands and listen to some free streaming music.
I have little care what 14 year olds are doing on MySpace. There are some eye-gougingly bad pages, as well others that are quite cool.
All of the things it does could be done with ordinary web pages, and yet, nothing comparable exists to my knowledge. The power is in the network of friends links.
For me, it was easy to jump in. Even though I am a professional software engineer, I just don't have the time/energy to bother finding a good webhosting service, designing a page, and so on. With MySpace, a few clicks and I have a servicable (albeit generic) page, and I am hooked in.
I'd rather spend the end of my days trawling sites half-naked chicks rather than the sites I see advertised here, mine included
Excuse me now, but I've something urgent to deal with...
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Christ! I hate buzz-words like Web 2.0. Please lordsie remove them 4evar!
Myspace makes kids think corporations are their friends by promoting
movies and records by making them seem like they are cool indies that have a cult following.
Can we say..... Superficial?
Can we say..... Valueing style over substance?
I'm a bit surprised to find nerds superficial, or valueing style. You should be happy everyone can finally establish a space for themselves on the internet. Or are you just jealous because any 7yo can make a "web page" now?
Either way, I would gladly look at 1,000 vomit-filled webpages if it meant meeting a REAL person in REAL life that I thought was cool. Oh yeah.. Nerds don't want friends, I forgot.
http://www.myspace.com/clintjcl
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
My browser has never, ever, ever crashed from MySpace.
Sounds to me that the disdain you have for myspace is misdirected. It should be at your browser and operating system.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I don't like the "Web 2.0" marketing fluff term either - but it's mainly propagated by Tim O'Reilly who really does know enough technology to have been hiring people to produce Unix and Programming books since before the Web was developed, and produce a lot of the early Web navigation materials before the search engines came out. He may be *selling* to the marketing-fluff-non-techie crowd, but he's plenty deep technically.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks