Power to the People

Filed in archive Internet TV on July 2, 2007

Less than 2 weeks ago, YouTube "upgraded" its site. Among the changes, it tried to steer viewers to videos that the company's editors thought worthy.

After a slew of angry comments, YouTube said it had restored category browsing and also said it never intended to permanently take away this functionality. Ya, right.

"The browse by category functionality is back up and running," the company stated on its blog last Wednesday. "Thanks again for your patience and please accept our apologies for any frustration that this temporary removal caused."

I postulate that YouTube is going corporate on us. It's a common malady effecting growing start ups; especially after they start to drink their own Kool Aid. The most classic symptom occurs when some middle manager confuses the interests of their community with that of their own well-being. In this iteration, YouTube forgot that one of its purported strengths was that whatever people thought interesting automatically rose to the top. Power to the people!

The mess-up is reminiscent to other clashes between Web 2.0 sites and the users. In May, company executives at Digg had to stop censoring posts that purported to tell people how to get around anti-piracy restrictions in DVDs when a user rebellion threatened to torpedo the site. And Facebook last September had to revise a new RSS feature within days of its introduction, after users complained that the revision violated their privacy.

Ironically, while Google/YouTube, Digg and Facebook helped build Web 2.0, they still don't seem to understand how social sites have changed the dynamics of Web publishing.