As we all know, YouTube is a Google property, and perhaps Google’s hottest property going. In the time since Google has acquired the company, I’ve seen lots of feature additions – playlists, “Who’s watching now”, even a Google advertising channel. With all of these feature additions, what I haven’t noticed is meaningful improvements to search and relevance, anti-spam efforts, or efforts to prevent gaming. Granted, a lot of this is likely going on behind-the-scenes, but I’ve noticed YouTube getting less and less of my time as I grow increasingly frustrated with the service.
It strikes me that so many of the problems with YouTube could be fixed by some very simple modifications to the way they present the video thumbnail. The first option would be to not just grab a predictable frame, and instead pick a random frame. Seems simple enough, right? If YouTube wanted to get a little bit more tricky they could offer a multiview thumbnail, which would show a few random frames from the movie. Frankly, any strategy that prevents me opening videos of teenagers talking into their webcams would make me happy.
At the same time, it seems that YouTube hasn’t put much effort into making search useful at all; the first result by views for Minneapolis bridge is some XXX Paris Hilton spam. I mean, if my email filter can catch these, why can’t YouTube? And is YouTube doing anything to prevent the botted results that have made the Most Popular feature almost useless?
Conspiracy theorists will say that YouTube/Google actually don’t care much about developing spam filters or screeing fraudsters. The more video the merrier, for Google to stress-test systems and accumulate the world’s content. However, YouTube being Google, and Google being Google, I have to believe that a number of geeks behind the Google wall of silence also secretly pine to make YouTube better. So do it! While YouTube will always serve a purpose (uploading videos), there’s plenty of competition in this market. Google bought YouTube for its community, and unless Google invests in tools that make the community experience more sane (and less spammy), the community will start to dry up. Let’s hope that this point is not lost on the YouTube/Google team.
