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The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google
So there’s an important distinction developing among “user generated content” sites — the distinction between sites that permit “true sharing” and those that permit only what I’ll call “fake sharing.”
A “true sharing” site doesn’t try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose.
A “fake sharing” site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.
In this sense, YouTube is a fake sharing site, while Flickr, (parts of) Google, blip.tv, Revver and EyeSpot are true sharing sites.
Fake Sharing Sites
YouTube gives users very cool code to either “embed” content on other sites, or to effectively send links of content to other sites. But never does the system give users an easy way to actually get the content someone else has uploaded. Of course, many have begun building hacks to suck content off of the YouTube site. (On the Mac, I’ve used TubeSock to do that). But this functionality — critical to true sharing — is not built into the YouTube system.
True Sharing Sites
By contrast, ever other major Web 2.0 company does expressly enable true sharing.
This difference, I suggest, in business models should be a focus of those keen to push the values of Web 2.0. Though Tim O’Reilly’s canonical statement of those values implies this freedom is necessary, it doesn’t really expressly say so. The freedom to access the content seems, in my view, related to the Web 2.0 principle that “the service automatically gets better the more people use it.” Or at least the right to access it if the author chooses (another Web 2.0 principle: Some Rights Reserved) seems essential for this ethic to make sense. As O’Reilly puts it, “Design for ‘hackability’ and ‘remixability’” — precisely what hoarding content doesn’t do.
- Flickr, for example, makes it simple to download Flickr images. (See, e.g., here.)
- blip.tv explicitly offers links to download various formats of the videos it shares. (See, e.g., here.)
- EyeSpot (a fantastic new site to enable web based remixing of video and audio) permits the download of the source and product files. (See, e.g., here.)
- Revver (the site that enables an ad-bug to be added to a video so the creator gets paid when each video is played) builds its whole business model on the idea that content can flow freely on the Net. (See, e.g., here.)
- And even Google increasingly enables access to the content it creates and collects. Its fantastic Book Search project enables people to download (funnily formatted) PDFs of public domain books. (I know this link used to work, but now that I’m in Germany, Google is obviously not permitting me access to the work because it is so insanely hard to know whether it is in the public domain anywhere else.) And I am told (though I’ve not yet seen how to do it), Google Videos can be download to a machine.
If YouTube is a trend, this is a depressing turn. No doubt, that amazing company has a billion things to think through (including what to do with more than a billion dollars). But one thing it really needs to keep in focus is a very important part of its success: That it was seen to respect the ethics of the web. Why post on YouTube rather Google Video? At least some did so because YouTube was “cooler.” Whether it continues to be as cool depends critically on the values it practices.
UPDATE: Joi has a fantastically thoughtful followup on this.
posted by [ Lessig ] on [ Oct 20 06 at 5:12 AM ] to [ free culture ] [ post diffusion: 4 trackbacks + technorati ]
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Comments on “ The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google”
Sounds like the problem that happened when a lot of IT-related discussions went from Usenet to web forums. On Usenet, anyone can write a newsreader or start up an NNTP server. You can’t do that on a message board — even when the users would be happy to spread their comments out to a broader audience.
When comments are stuck on one site, the site operator doesn’t have incentives for putting a better UI on them that are as strong as the incentives for putting a better UI on a newsreader.
Users who generate content about IT subjects gave up a lot of their power in return for escaping from Usenet spam. Now the spammers are hitting web boards — see you back on Usenet, anyone?
FYI: to download videos from Google Video or Youtube, I suggest “VideoDownloader”, they have a website where you enter in the url of the video you want and it gives you back download links. They also have a plugin for firefox that does the same thing.
VideoDownloader homepage
http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php
VideoDownloader - firefox plugin
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
best of luck,
Thunt
http://thunt.net - read more rants
Maybe I’m missing something obvious about why you can’t figure out downloading video from Google Video. I do it by clicking the big button labeled “Download” on every Google Video page I’ve ever been to.
Just because when you do that (at least on my machine) the thing you get is not a full file, but something that still needs to grab the stuff from Google when you want to run it. I’d love to be able (easily) to show things to others when offline (e.g., when making a presentation), but the file Google gives me won’t do that.
???
If you select “download for Windows/Mac”, you get (or at least I get) a full file in .AVI format. It doesn’t need anything from Google to run. Maybe you have something configured on your machine for “Google Video player”. But that player is not necessary to use the downloaded file.
I wrote about this phenomon in an article titled “Web 3.0” - link on my web site.
In a nutshell, as more and more people gain full-time, always on Internet, we wonder why we have to host our pictures and videos on someone else’s site instead of just doing it ourselves and linking it all together, somehow.
Yehuda
On a related note, something I personally think is really evil in a lock-in kinda way: republishing feeds (republishing an RSS feed with links back to YOUR site, effectively *STEALING* subscribers). Podshow used to do it, even goodie-all Odeo does it (although they promised to stop doing it upon their next release).
China is considering to require using real name for registering to blog (only for registering, blogger can use fake name on their blogs). Any comments, Mr. Lessig?
It is time to overthrow the government of the United States by any means including violence. I realize that I have now committed treason and fully expect to be executed when caught.
Yehuda- The big issue is the asymetric connections we have. Comcast caps the upstream on my line at 384kb, making streaming video off my server hard. Orb, with it’s 2.0 beta, has great tools for self publishing, but it runs into the upstream bottleneck. There’s also the concern about copyright. Orb intentionally limits sharing to mitigate the impact.
Sorry, but of course YouTube is a “real sharing-site”. It’s not required to download files. It’s simply not necessary and would contradict the idea of actual things uploaded on youtube, if avaible for download, youtube never would have this sucess.
People can upload whatever they want on youtube – people can view, exchange and link these things, people can answer on videos, so why should anybody need to download a file stores and viewable at anytime on youtube?
I do like to put forward one site that you can download kinds of software. Qweas.com offers services including software search, downloads, store, directory, and so on. http://www.qweas.com/
“Why post on YouTube rather Google Video?”
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve preferred Youtube from the beginning just for its Favorites ability. When I find a video I like, I like to add it to my favorites list (nicely categorized) so I can find it again show friends. I just assumed that and other little features drove media consumers to youtube, and media supply followed that demand, making youtube the most popular for both.
Try opera browser which has an easily accessible cache folder, and then ffmpeg to convert youtube movies once viewed back to a raw or preferred format.
Perhaps YouTube shares “just enough”… its success was largely based on the sharing of transient videos such as video blogs and humorous/shocking clips-of-the-day.
Being able to download from YouTube would be handy for those with slower or unreliable connections who can’t get acceptable quality with streaming. It’s also kind of wasteful to have to download the stream every time you watch a video (okay, there might be some caching). Remember, you pay for your bandwidth, watch a video once, you’ve used the bandwidth. Why spend the bandwidth again? Unneeded traffic also puts more strain on the ol’ Internet, if anyone cares.
But then again, most of the crap on YouTube, and pretty much every other “social” Web2.0.0.0.1 beta site, is watch once and wish for your time back. No real demand to download it.
Perhaps YouTube shares “just enough”… their success is largely due to transient sharing such as video blogs and cool clips-of-the-day so it effectively meets the needs. After all, people generally don’t share their RAW format images or photographic negatives on Flickr.
It’s an interesting argument howver I dont think that their is really a difference of sharing content like you described. You tube succeeded not because it was cooler then google video, it was easier to use. It’s my opinion that apart from web zealots most people dont want to download and mix up content. They want to access it easily and see something new.
Thanks, interesting post.
However, as a contributor I would probably be more interested in sharing the fame and fortune. Fame is “free”, if I post a video and everybody sees it, instant fame. However, sharing the fortune is a different issue. By allowing me to use YouTube’s bandwidth to post content on my site (!!!) and profit from ad revenue they are sharing their fortune.
I believe this measure is more important as it applies to the contributors not the passive viewers. The contributors are what makes all this possible. According to this measure YouTube is major Web2.0.
The challenge remains for YouTube itself to make a profit too.
Thanks,
Uri
interestung. Thanks!
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