TVSquad

youtube is such a great site. i am addticted to it. when I am having a hard or stressful day i can just watch videos of people making total fools of themselves and it makes me feel hell of alot better.
Totally agree about myspace its got alot issues with it.

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MySpace sucks so much. Why do so many supposedly intelligent people use it? We'll never know.

YouTube on the other hand is awesome except for one ONE THING. Why can't we download the videos like we can on Google Video?? I mean seriously! WTF is a FLV file? All the mac players suck. GIVE US THE FREAKING ORIGINAL VIDEO FILES!

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MySpace is a phenomenon that will never be replicated, though that will not stop a zillion start-ups from trying!

Here's the short short version of the MySpace success story:

* They got hipsters and musicians in LA to use it
* Friendster, the big shot of the moment, made several fatal errors:
- They had major scaling issues
- They tried to tell people what to do (e.g. a goldfish or "William Shatner" couldn't have its own profile)
- They tried to restrict what people could do with profiles (e.g. no hideous purple-on-black font)
* Friendster people migrated to MySpace, and then the Big Momentum was on

Why are musicians all over MySpace?

Because they HAVE to be. Everyone else is already there already.

I'm becoming a big fan of TV Squad, by the way, really dig it!

Eric Berlin
Exec Producer
Blogcritics.org

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Where'd you get that about the plural? I think your source is unreliable. It doesn't even pass the smell test, since we all know that the plural of many such words derived from Latin is the form ending with the "a".

The plural of "memorandum" is "memoranda"; the plural of "curriculum" is "curricula"; the plural of "reticulum" is "reticula"; the plural of "omasum" is "omasa"; the plural of "bacterium" (which Latin took from a Greek word anyway) is "bacteria".

Similary, the plural of "phenomenon" is "phenomena".

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I'm with you, Urbey. Bob, I don't care WHAT Webster says--and are you sure you're not talking about Emmanuel Lewis?--the plural is phenomena and the singular is phenomenon. Just like criterion and criteria. Is Webster trying to pass some bogus "criterias" over on us, too? Fuhgeddabaddit.

I am with you, though, on the reason for YouTube's popularity. "'[Y]ou get to see cool videos on the web for free'" beats the hell out of "ease of use."

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The biggest problem with MySpace is that there's really no point to it. Maybe that's also why it's succeeding, but it's not centered around blogging or music or dating or forging any real connections with people. The only real point of having a MySpace page is having a MySpace page. This actually leads in to problem #2.

The next problem with MySpace is that it's so poorly designed it's almost unusable. That goes for the back-end as well as the front end. I really wish that they would take some UI tips from places live last.fm and LiveJournal to make MySpace more usable and easier to navigate and search. But those places are centered around music and blogging, respectively. Since MySpace has no focused purpose, the designers made it to be all things to all people, reinforcing the UI crappiness.

Unfortunately, MySpace reached the level of self-sustaining popularity that means, unless they do something really stupid, they will continue to grow. I am hoping for MySpace 2.0. Hopefully that will fix their UI and just make the site cleaner (design-wise, at least) and easier to use. Maybe they'll also figure out how to harness the unfocused nature of the site into something that feels like it has a point.

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I decided to make a new post for my thoughts for YouTube.

YouTube just works. I haven't uploaded anything to it, but I've watched lots of things on it with no problems, even though I am a Mac user browsing with Safari.

MTV's video content doesn't work for me, Google Video sometimes does wacky stuff, and Comedy Central's site froze my browser. Lots of places make their video content difficult to actually watch. You have to download codecs, or use crappy streaming formats.

YouTube doesn't. In fact, it makes viewing video content pleasant and easy. So it makes perfect sense that they're popular.

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Merriam-Webster do say that (http://m-w.com/dictionary/phenomena), but I think they're full of it, too. They cite usage of "phenomenas" as plural but list no examples. I think "phenomenons" as a possible plural is much less egregious, but even that's a little iffy. I suppose "phenomenas" might have a place when describing multiple *groups* of phenomena -- essentially a plural of a plural -- but, in this case, I don't think that applies.

Which is all pretty tedious and pedantic. But, then, so too is a lot of YouTube and MySpace.

Why is a site with tons of free and sometimes illictly posted video clips popular? Gee, I wonder. As for MySpace...well you should never discount loneliness, stalkers, or the the hope of seeing the occasional boobie.

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Jason Anderson:

An FLV file is just a Flash Video file, which you can download using a number of methods, and play on a Mac using VLC Player, or convert using iSquint

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Jason Anderson (again):

Sorry, didn't realise that the HTML would be stripped from my comment:

VLC Player - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

iSquint - http://www.isquint.org/

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YouTube's popularity is pretty much a given, so onto my inevitable myspace rant.

Most of myspace's popularity boils down to sheer egoism. No longer are those silly, shallow teens stuck on xanga, where they could write about themselves and essentially demand responses, with myspace they don't even have to go through all that trouble. Put up ridiculous looking photos to show off their hotness, recieve oversupportive comments, no soliciting required. Who wants to take the time to write out complete sentences then there's super cool party people to make out with, anyway?
However, by making the blogging option available, that attacts the more intellectual egoists, who desire respect not only for their ability to take a cute picture but also to write a few profound statements on the ways of the world. Nevermind that anything you have to say will automatically sound 50 times stupider when said on myspace.
Then, of course, there's the music. This is about the only redeeming factor of myspace, as far as I can tell. Nevermind that there's so many people on there all the time that the server's always overloaded so that listening to a song takes all year.
As for the layout, I don't know how people volunteerily deal with that. The thing is so ugly and unnavicable it's absurd. I once tried to design a layout for it using divs, but it was such a headache to design that I gave up the moment I remembered that I loathe and therefore often do not use myspace as it is.

In short, kids these days. I do try not to judge my peers, but it can't be helped; it's too true.

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Myspace is not yet what it will someday (soon) become. Remember, Rupert Murdoch owns it. He's named his new network MyNetwork. A coincidence? I think not.

The FOX owned and operated stations recently floated plans for changing their URLs to things like mynewyork.com and myla.com.

NewsCorp will see to it that MySpace becomes a very important portal for 'repurposing' episodes of your favorite FOX shows, video on demand, local newscasts and who knows what else!

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I really never expected MySpace to become the monster it has become. When I heard that it was popular with bands and their fans, it didn't hit me just how quickly people would be washing into the site. So I stuck with Friendster. Then one day I logged into my Myspace account I'd set up, and I noticed there were tons more people than were on Friendster. Yes, it's user interface is a pain. Yes, it's missing some features one might think were critical (such as easy to use Instant Messaging). But it has the one feature you have to have to be successful in social networking: people. And tons of them. It doesn't matter how ugly it is, how awkward the site is. You go on to those sites to hook up with people you know or people you want to know. As long as Myspace doesn't screw up, it will be to this decade what AOL was to the previous decade.

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I find the biggest problem with MySpace is that it's just so gosh-darn ugly. The only reason I use it at all is because I'm a local musician and it helps me keep track of who's actually listening. However, I have no idea how it gained this type of prominence in the first place.

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myspace is for people not smart enough to get into college and have a facebook account. There, I said it.

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myspace is the internet for 14 year olds, as they get more advanced, myspace will die a quick death.

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The same reason Grand Theft Auto blew the Gaming Industry, you are free to do what you want while secretly being curbed.

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