YouTube hits back at Yahoo!

By Steve Malone

Posted on 6 Jun 2006 at 10:44

The Internet phenomenon that is YouTube has shot back at Yahoo!'s video revamp with new features intended to bind its community of video posters closer together.

YouTube has become incredibly successful and now attracts a mind boggling 50 million views and 50,000 video uploads every day according to its own statistics. Now for a community that sees itself as a collection of movie and TV moguls, the developers have added some features that make it easier to use.

The site now allows everyone to create their own collection or 'channel' of their own and other people's videos, which they can broadcast to the world. Other new features in channels include Video Logs to let members showcase and discuss their own videos, 'Channels I'm Watching' that tells other users what you like best, and colour customisation features.

To further capitalise on the trend towards commenting on other people's videos, the site has extended the video embedding feature by adding a 'blog it' button that allows a user to post videos directly to Blogger, BlogSpot and LiveJournal.

Finally, to help you relocate that clip of the tap-dancing racoon that you loved so much, YouTube has added a viewing history log of the last 100 videos that have been watched.

Last week, Yahoo! upgraded its own video service in an attempt to match the runaway success of YouTube. However, it still lags way behind in market share of the burgeoning video sharing sector.

The talk of the industry is which of the majors will snap up YouTube, a company which was only founded in February 2005 and has just 32 employees. Until it launched its own revamped service last week, the front runner was thought to be Yahoo! However, many people now think that Microsoft might be willing to dip into its huge war chest to snap up the video service.