Videos à la Flickr

Less than a month after Yahoo bought new-generation photo-sharing site Flickr, Google has just unveiled it own vision of content-sharing ... for videos. Through its Video Upload Program, it is adopting the same concept of a publication website (powered by its video search engine) and an uploader (or should I say Uploadr? :-) ). The interesting twist is that as a user you can set a price for the homemade videos you have uploaded, thereby opening the commercial doors to the content at the further end of the Long Tail. What seems to be currently missing however is the ability to enforce a specific form of copyright to one's own videos (such as Creative Commons).

Is Google thinking of turning itself as a search-powered, C2C platform - just like Ebay did for auctions and Craig's List for classified, albeit this time for searchable and indexed content? Only time will tell as the service is in its early stage, but as the technical barriers around videos on the web are disappearing one after the other (codecs, hosting, bandwidth...), this is the logical next frontier...

Comments

[Hadrien]

Thanks 4 this interesting point of vue Ludovic! It's interesting to see how Google is going fast in its diversification. Some would probably say they don't know what to do with so much money since their IPO last summer. However serching video throughout the web (and responding to Yahoo!)is staight to Google's objective, which is in Sergey Brin's own words organise the immensity, probably more than their acquisition of Picasa for example. This interesting new acquisition pointed out by Ludovic (thx!) seems to complete another video-based service by Google, Current. Current is some sort of TV for the Web, with its own studio and all. However what I would like to know is how Google is planning to create synergy between all these different services, as since for example Current is also profit-oriented. So if anyone is willing to take a guess...Ludovic? :-)

[Francisque]

Salut,

Nous nous sommes croisés lors de la soirée Paris blogue t-il ?

Je t'ai vu sur feedmap. Es tu ds le 4ème ?

A bientôt,

[Ludovic Copéré]

Hadrien > When Google (or Yahoo, for that matters) says their goal is to search and organize the world, it can but diversify: whenever some heap of data reaches some critical mass, smart search and organization becomes key to enable those services (blogs -> Technorati, pictures -> Flickr, desktop files -> Google desktop search or Spotlight, and so on ...). Today they are that many niches in and around, the next step should be the "glue" holding those pieces together...

Francisque > Yep, on s'était brièvement croisé à l'Entrepôt jeudi dernier; je ne suis pas dans le 4ème (plutôt dans le 8ème) mais ça se fait facilement à coup de métro.

À la prochaine (le 25 au Sénat ?)

[Jonathan Monk]

Have you seen YouTube, http://www.youtube.com? It's more of a community-based, video-centric website. I think, while Google is still in quite the limelight with the general public, as people learn the lengths at which Google invades privacy to gather its data to correlate web resources, people will start leaving Google for smaller companies.

For example, Flickr will always overshadow whatever Google is able to deliver because of the community and trust that Flickr has earned.

[Ludovic Copéré]

Didn't know about YouTube, I'm checking it out. What is today happening with Google (and on a similar scale with Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN) is a quick aggregation of service (from search to cross-media with photos/audio/video coming up), access (through broadband, mobile, APIs...) and profiling (a single GMail or Google account now allows personnalization of search results, which inevitably creates privacy issues.

I totally agree with the example of Flickr, but as it has recently been acquired by Yahoo, one can wonder how the community-based trust building process will evolve and whether it will be somehow integrated with the much broader Yahoo services.