Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’
Posted on January 12, 2009 - by Justin Hartman
What YouTube looked like in 2005
This particular post has been sitting in my drafts since July 2008 after the iLab guys and I started looking at the similarities between YouTube’s logo and another South African company. This spurred on an analysis of the evolution of YouTube since it’s beginning and it was fascinating for me to see how the site evolved over a 12-month period during 2005.
The following screenshots (taken from the WayBack Machine) highlight the key design and functional changes during this period.
There was very little detail available for April 2005 however what I did find interesting was the drop downs that indicate that YouTube may have been somewhat of a dating site. I can’t seem to find any reference to this apart from the screenshots and if anyone has any info I’d love to know.
In June YouTube introduced search as a dominant feature on the home page and a new tag line, “Your Digital Video Repository”, is conceptualised.
By August the classic YouTube is launched with search remaining as a dominant feature however more priority is given to featured videos. This is the first time that YouTube really looks functional and easy to use. Very smartly YouTube drops the stupid “Your Digital Video Repository” tag line and changes it to a more functional one liner, “Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!”. What’s also interesting to note is that this new design highlights the start of the relationship with Google with the introduction of Google Adsense code in the sidebar.
Not many changes in September from August but YouTube have now introduced the Recently Viewed functionality to the home page as well as a new Last 8 users online sidebar.
While there are some minor design changes in December the highlight of this screenshot is the introduction of YouTube’s now trademarked tag line – Broadcast Yourself.
I love looking at the evolution of main-stream products and what I particularly liked about YouTube’s evolution is seeing how they struggled to position themselves with their tag line. In Afrigator‘s case we’re constantly trying to work on our positioning and we’re yet to find the killer one-liner. It’s good to see though that as a product evolves along with functionality and simplicity so does the positioning and I’m optimistic that we’ll figure this out with time.
Posted on February 26, 2008 - by Justin Hartman
YouTube and that horrific Eduardo tackle
Not only did I watch Arsenal drop two points to Man United on Saturday but I also bore witness to a horrific tackle on Arsenal striker Eduardo which saw him fracture his left fibula as well as sustain an open dislocation of his ankle joint in the same leg. During the match Sky Sports refused to show the replay of the tackle claiming it was too gruesome to repeat.
Now I don’t know about you but I hate being censored so, on Sunday afternoon, lazing about at my parents home, I opened the YouTube application on my iPhone and did a search for eduardo tackle to see if someone had posted a video of the full footage.
Amazingly there were well over 100 results and I started to watch some of the gruesome footage uploaded by YouTube users… it was very upsetting.
Over a coffee discussion yesterday I told Gregor to do a similar search on YouTube to watch the unedited video but when he tried to click a video, any video, all he got was a message saying “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Arsenal Football Club”.
Back in August last year we went through a process, well Gregor did, whereby The Times had a copyright infringement case and it was very interesting to see YouTube’s take on all of this.
It took YouTube about three days to remove the video in question but we were also invited to use their Content Verification Tool which allows content owners to request removal of infringing content by using check boxes and “select all” functions. A very simple interface and a seemingly immediate solution to copyright infringement.
I was just fascinated how quickly these videos of the Eduardo tackle disappeared from YouTube and it would appear that this self-managed solution is really helping all content owners combat the issue of plagiarism. It is clearly a much more efficient way of handling these types of issues than having YouTube moderate everything through a three-day lengthy process.
If you are interested in viewing images of the tackle in question I have uploaded them here and here and if you want to see the live TV footage I have a short video clip of the tackle here. I must warn you it’s not pretty which is why I haven’t embedded it into this post.
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