{"id":1022,"date":"2006-04-28T09:40:29","date_gmt":"2006-04-28T16:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=1022"},"modified":"2006-04-28T09:40:29","modified_gmt":"2006-04-28T16:40:29","slug":"a-grand-unified-theory-of-youtube-and-myspace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/28\/a-grand-unified-theory-of-youtube-and-myspace\/","title":{"rendered":"A Grand Unified Theory of YouTube and MySpace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulboutin.com\">Paul Boutin<\/a> is at it again, this time with his sights on MySpace (it&#8217;s what the kids are into these days) and YouTube.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2140635\/fr\/rss\/\">Slate<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><i>But the focus on the collaborative nature of these sites has been nagging at me. Sites like Friendster and Blogger that promote sharing and friend-making have been around for years with nowhere near the mainstream success. I&#8217;ve got a different theory. YouTube and MySpace are runaway hits because they combine two attributes rarely found together in tech products. They&#8217;re easy to use, and they don&#8217;t tell you what to do.<\/p>\n<p>There are two design requirements for technology meant for the masses. First, you need to automate all the techie parts so people can just press Play. To watch television online, I shouldn&#8217;t have to install extra video software, figure out my bandwidth setting (100K? 300K?), and sign up for an account with the player&#8217;s maker. Second, Web moguls shouldn&#8217;t presume to foresee what 100 million people will want to do with their site. I&#8217;m one of many who stopped using Google&#8217;s Orkut social network because its hardwired page designs made everyone look like they were there to find a date and\/or a job.<\/p>\n<p>The guys behind YouTube hit the sweet spot. Most important, they made it head-slappingly easy to publish and play video clips by handling the tricky parts automatically. Given up on BitTorrent because it feels like launching a mission to Mars? If you&#8217;ve sent an e-mail attachment, you&#8217;ve got the tech skills to publish on YouTube. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Boutin is at it again, this time with his sights on MySpace (it&#8217;s what the kids are into these days) and YouTube. Slate: But the focus on the collaborative nature of these sites has been nagging at me. Sites like Friendster and Blogger that promote sharing and friend-making have been around for years with nowhere near the mainstream success. I&#8217;ve got a different theory. YouTube and MySpace are runaway hits because they combine two attributes rarely found together in&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[88,103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-i-love-the-internet","category-journalism","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-gu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}