YouTube Archive

As of about 7:52pm Eastern time this evening, YouTube went into “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” mode. In our testing, embedded videos appear to be working a-ok.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter. In fact questions about YouTube’s outage are coming in so quickly that the instant you hit submit, there are already a batch more in the search queue!

Interestingly Ben Parr from Mashable reported that YouTube will start rolling out a new homepage and layout today. Perhaps the outage has to do with the new layout rollout. I have confirmed that interior pages are working fine with the new layout.

One Twitter user noted, “I’m going to die without YouTube ):”

I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time.

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update: 8:17pm – YouTube is back, resume video watching.

As of about 7am Eastern time this morning, YouTube went into “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” mode. In our testing, embedded videos appear to be working a-ok.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter.  In fact questions about YouTube’s outage are coming in so quickly that the instant you hit submit, there are already a batch more in the search queue!

One Twitter user noted, “I’m going to die without YouTube ):”

I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time. 

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update 7:13am – the current error message shows a 500 Internal Service Error.

Update: 8:15am – still down – Check out this good list of alternative videos put together by Zee at NextWeb.

Update: 8:45am – YouTube is back! Resume cat video watching!

YouTube is currently down for maintenance – over the past 2-3 hours, our testing shows the service up and down. There are a bunch of people posting messages on Twitter with their sad smiley faces because they can’t watch the latest cat video or the latest wedding video.  Our sources tell us that the service is down because they are adding “UCM” – ultra cat mode.

While the service is down, please consider cleaning your house, washing your car, taking a walk outside (gasp!), visiting a new startup, reading a book, etc. Check out our YouTube down section for previous outages.

Interestingly, the “down for maintenance” page (as seen below) includes a search box. The search works but any video you select displays the same down for maintenance page – it’s an endless loop! As always please report in if YouTube is down where you are located.

This seems to have been a tough week for Google and their servers. Twice this past week Google News was down. Google noted that the issues apparently had to do with planes and backed-up Web traffic. Now I’ve been noticing for a while now that YouTube isn’t acting correctly. Many pages don’t load, videos are displaying an error message and the search function provides the error message displayed below.

As usual, please report in if you are experiencing issues with YouTube (or any other Google service). I hope they can get everything fixed so that we can watch more cat videos!

The last YouTube outage occured on April 23rd. At least Twitter is up and stable.

Content voting service Reddit has announced the launch of Reddit TV today. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee notes that Reddit TV is very similar to StumbleVideo from StumbleUpon which launched quite a long time ago.

There are a variety of categories including geek, happy, politics, sports and wtf. They are actively seeking sponsors to create “sponsored channels” and as a test they are using videos from the TED conference. Reddit has integrated Twitter as well so you can send messages to your followers which push them to the Reddit page (not the source content page).

Here’s a video from Reddit on how the service works…

Back in December, comScore reported that online video site Hulu reached 235 million streams which moved them into 6th place on the top 10 online video streams list. Today comScore released their latest videos viewed list for March 2009 and Hulu has moved up to the 3rd spot with 380 million videos.

This puts Hulu right behind Google/YouTube and Fox Interactive and moves Hulu above Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom. To put the 380 million mark in perspective, Google including YouTube videos were viewed over 5 billion times.

comScore is also reporting that for the month of March, Google/YouTube passed 100 million unique viewers. Hulu came in with 41 million viewers which puts the online video service in the 4th slot.

Other notes from comScore include: 77.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average video length was just over 3 minutes.

Do you find yourself watching a lot of videos on Hulu? To be honest I’ve only used the service when I have missed a TV show that they offer (e.g. Lost, Chuck, etc.).

The topic of paid social media is something I’ve been thinking about a lot of the past few months. When I met with Scott Monty of Ford, I mentioned the idea of assuming that all social media is paid. Perhaps you already do assume that what you read is already paid or sponsored although I’ve tried to think that what I read is genuine unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this discussion, I am leaving the “is paid social media good or evil” on the side for another day.

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure – it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Continue reading “Should We Assume All Social Media is Paid?” »