InsideGoogle

Google Video Moves Closer To YouTube

Google Video has added almost every feature distinguishing it from YouTube, getting user ratings, comments, tagging and posting to popular services.

Along the right-side bar, you can rate videos from one to five stars (or Poor to Excellent) and see how many people rated the video. There is also a box for adding a tag, which Google calls labels, to help categorize the video. While the rating system is getting a ton of use (I’ve seen videos with 300 ratings already), tagging is being abused. This video, featuring a mom and cute babies, has these tags:

• zwemmen
• zidane
• xxx
• soooo cute!
• sex
• retarded
• pojat
• paris
• p.o.d.
• mma
• milf
• laugh
• japan
• hot
• gay blind

I’m not too worried. While no system currently exists, you know Google will find a fix for the abuse pretty quickly.

The comments are good. Click the comments link, and the playlist is replaced by the comments list, with a reverse chronological order, and a box to leave your own at the bottom. Your comments have nothing to do with your Google Account; you comment anonymously or leave whatever name you’d like. You also can leave your five star rating with the comment. Comments can be arranged by rating instead of time.

Here is Google Video’s commenting policy:

Policies
These policies apply to the comments you leave as well as the labels you use for videos.

• Do not spam or post fake reviews intended to boost or lower ratings
• Do not post or link to content that is sexually explicit or contains profanity
• Do not post or link to content that is abusive or hateful, threatens or harasses others
• Do not post or or link to any file that contains viruses, corrupted files, “Trojan Horses,” or any other contaminating or destructive features that may damage someone else’s computer
• Do not post any material that violates the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of others
• Do not impersonate any person, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity
• Do not violate any other applicable law or regulation

Guidelines/Tips

• Post clear, valuable, honest information
• Try to include positives and drawbacks
• Be nice to others; do not attack others
• Use good grammar and check your spelling
• Make your comments useful and informative
• Keep it readable; do not use excessive capitalization and punctuation

You can now also click the “Share” link and get all of the necessary code for embedding in any blog or website, but also links to directly embed at MySpace, LiveJournal, TypePad or Blogger. Give Google your login information (and choose to save it), and you can post to your blog with barely any effort at all. This looks very well executed.

Some bloggers have said that they don’t like that Google is cramming all of this in the sidebar. It isn’t perfect, but I agree with the decision. Google is emphasizing the video, not creating endless pages of crap material, like the other services do. I am so sick of scrolling down infinite YouTube pages, and Google is using some smart JavaScript to simply show you the information you are looking for and hiding the rest, not cluttering up the page.

The Google Video interface has finally arrived. When we first saw it, it had too few features, and tried too hard to be sparse. Now, it has oodles of goodies to use, but remains clean and simple at the same time. A Google Video page is one screen, a YouTube page can stretch forever. Google has struck a perfect balance of cleanliness and features, while barely sacrificing either.

July 3rd, 2006 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Google Video, Search, General | 3 comments