Tutorial 3 & 4

Assuming that you have been appointed as the new CEO of YouTube, discuss in your groups answers to these questions :

1. What are the factors that lead to the extreme popularity of YouTube, especially with keen competition from other social network services like Wiki, Blogs and Facebook.

I think one factor is the fact that YouTube was marketed primarily as a video sharing site. Other social network services, such as Facebook, focus on the social networking aspect of the internet, that is, to keep in touch with friends, and make new ones. Others like blogs focus on sharing your life with the people on the internet. Wikis help users create collaborative websites and power community websites. What makes YouTube stand out from the rest is that users can now express themselves through video, where, on a site that deals primarily in videos, it is sure to be viewed and opinions formulated about it. This revolutionary way of declaring one's existence in the world is more engaging than mini applications found in social networking services that lets users "poke" each other, thus generating far more response from other users.

Another contributing factor is that YouTube has the ability to function as a social network service as well. The way it is being used right now can be said to be social networking, where users share their opinions about others' videos, add other YouTube users as friends and meet them, and even reply to videos with their own videos. Users can post vlogs (or video logs) of their daily life by simply recording what they see and uploading it every day. The video could be a restricted video for friends only, or a public video for the whole world to see. The users could comment on the video, rate it, save it as a favourite, and reply with their own videos. There is so much interactivity on YouTube. A picture says a thousand words and videos definitely say much more, which is why YouTube is so successful.

Finally, I think that YouTube is so popular because of its ease of use. There is no need for a YouTube account to view YouTube videos, nor is there a need to convert videos to upload them (although you do need an account to upload). YouTube makes use of the Adobe Flash Player, which is cross-platform compatible and does not require the downloading of an external video player program. Because of the nature of Flash, users can also embed their videos in other sites for easy viewing.


2. The article discusses some downsides to YouTube. How would you deal with these issues?

Since videos are uploaded onto YouTube not by us, the company, but the whole world of users, the real responsibility lies with the users themselves. By uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, they are undermining our operation, but until we fold, they will not stop because some people just will not see the forest for the trees, and we cannot jeopardise our business and the support of the other non-violators for these people. This is why the only thing we can do is to have moderators online 24/7 to delete copyrighted content as quickly as possible. This is not a downside to YouTube, rather, a problem with the ideals of YouTube users.

Privacy is another issue that is solved by user morality. Most people do not care for the privacy of others if the end result is enjoyment for themselves. The only way we can deal with the issue is to allow an option to restrict profile viewing. However, this would greatly reduce the interactivity of YouTube as a social site but to curb these issues we may have no choice. As for privacy in real life, people have to learn to be more careful about where they do what.

3. What would be the future direction for YouTube? Refer to the sections “Where is it going?” and “What are the implications for teaching and learning” for some ideas.

The future direction of YouTube could be social networking, where YouTube has still so much to tap into. This allows for more interactivity between the users. Also, YouTube could be the host for video competitions, where people were previously required to send in their videos, they can instead upload them onto YouTube for an online panel of judges to decide winners.