I am envious

Enough is enough! There’s been quite a lot coverage all over place already so I will not do any redundant work, but to express how envious I am on the $1.65 billion deal.

A growth from literally 0 to $1.65 b in less than a year, what a miracle benefited from the exploding popularity of web2.0, a yet indefinitely defined term. It’s probably not just YouTube team’s success, but some users too. The video uploader and audiances, all contributed in creating this “ridiculously” huge capital with in the period and successfully converted into real value…

What’s the deal?

Google is bidding on future internet video ads, as analyzed by someone I cannot remember exactly who.

Well, I totally agree with the prediction that companies are moving their ads from TV to Internet. I watch TV as frequently as less than 2 hours every week…I am an extreme example but I think more people will become less “real life social” as I am…(while I am trying hard to get out of the Matrix…). I would be glad if someone cares about people like me, and actually tries to market me, even though I will resist ads. XD.

Good deal?

I don’t know. But buying a video database not immediately means a perfect advertising platform. The content is most important. TV companies could respond with putting their broadcastings online and their professional programs would attract most interests and more importantly, copyrighted programs probably cannot survive on YouTube or any other video sharing services any more. YouTube could degrade to a “funny family videos” collection.

Saw this mini statistics of some of the most known social network sites from TechCrunch. MySpace tops in the ranking and left the second, Facebook, whose founder is the controversial young man Mark Zuckerberg, way behind the horizontal line.

Facebook would catch up a bit in next few months, based on its announcement of open registration. Now anyone can have an account without having to be from Universities that the system recognizes.

Now, just look at these websites, most of them looks quite sketchy, in terms of graphics and interactions. Very few gradient, no round corners and other sort of refinement. Blinking advertisements eliminate all the white space and distract users.

If a normal web service, like news portal, music download, or newly lauched blogs, ever looks like that, visitors would immediately run away. However, these some millions of unique visitors, do stay on site, neglecting eye-hurting ads and keep browsing for excitement, as the sites supposed to offer.

What’s the success factor behind the scene? Technology and even Visual Appealness are not as important as they are to other websites. Without these, the only thing I can see that make MySpace successful is it allows to users to customize their own pages, to an extent that no others allow to. How many people left msnspace or still refuse to use it because of its lack of freedom of layout and template customization. And how many people feel timid being told that cannot access ones profile because the person is not in my network yet.

“…Technology and even Visual Appealness are not as important…”

MySpace removed all these constrains and allows anyone, even unregistered users to browse register users pages. Also, users can add any objects to their personal pages, YouTube, flashes, windows media player, as well as set transparency and background images etc.. To me those pages look totally unpolished and lack artful overall look. But I guess young people are tough and are able to survive and expand their life on those. Ya, so maybe the generation is fairly “realistic” actually, as contents are most important, over-emphasized decorations not neccessary. :)

Besides, I am looking forward to Facebook to grow too.