It’s been over 5 hours that I can’t access any of the clips I’ve uploaded to YouTube. What’s up with this? The dotcom returns an error message too, and it’s not the first time this is happening. I think I’ll start looking around for alternatives because I now depend on the service of one provider, and that’s not a good thing. If anything goes wrong there, my entire blog is suffering from it. The eternal loading loop in the status bar is just one thing, the fact that they don’t even display a temporary thumb is another. Now it’s just a blank space. People keep waiting, and then nothing happens. That’s just ridiculous.
I think if you can’t scale a video streaming service in a way so it permits you to roll out updates without having to shut down the entire process and servers, you better stop delivering the service all together.
Too bad I don’t own my content anymore. 350 + commercials… that’s not a huge loss, but still. I don’t have all of them offline anymore and I certainly don’t have the time to start uploading them again to another host.
Really, I think I’m going to look for a new place and start uploading new stuff there, and then hope it keeps working. Or this update should turn out to be really really great.
Web 2.0 according to YouTube plainly sucks. You don’t have any rights on your content, you can’t collect your content and download it to go elsewhere. You’re totally depending on the goodwill of the company to keep your data alive and accessible. Once people realize this, 2.0 and user generated content will be slowing down in growth. If the first 2.0 companies will start to stop offering their services, a shockwave will run through the internet. For now it’s still sunshine and pretty flowers… most 2.0 companies are small, sell out in time or just quit existing because they were useless. Others like YouTube grow too fast, can’t scale and then cut back in the service.
Does Flickr have an ‘export all your pictures to a .zip’ feature? I know BubbleShare has it, but I haven’t seen it on my Flickr account. Before I engage into a new service, the first thing I’m going to check is if I can retrieve any data input.
Martijn
April 29, 2006 at 11:09 am
Which YouTube-alternative would you recommend?
Coolz0r
April 29, 2006 at 12:21 pm
I’m looking around, browsing through my archive and putting my ear down on the tracks of the iron horse to listen to what’s coming. I’ll let you know, and blog about it when I’ve made my decision.
Phil
July 31, 2006 at 12:01 pm
When gmail went down for maintenance a few weeks ago it suddenly struck me that there is no recourse with web 2.0 systems. Although it’s highly unlikely, Google have the right to pull gmail at any time – that would be devastating for myself and millions of others.
In reality I suspect many of the big players in the web 2.0 field are more reliable than a lot of “paid for” services but it’s always in the back of my mind that they can drop the service whenever they want.
Plus, even traditional, paid for services go down once in a while so I wouldn’t write off YouTube just yet but maybe keep a backup of you vids just in case.