When I opened my inbox this morning, I was greeted with the following email from YouTube, which in short, was telling me that my video (one from the London Moonwalk Tribute) had been removed and disabled access. The reason was … Copyright Infringement !
Here is the email in full:

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Viacom International Inc. claiming that this material is infringing:

“Last one” Moonwalk Tribute for Michael Jackson at Liverpool Street Station – London 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sMS0kDegO4

Please Note: Repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to prevent this from happening, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube’s copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

If you elect to send us a counter notice, please go to our Help Centre to access the instructions.

Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.

Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.

I quickly went to my YouTube account and immediately greeted with the following big sign:

Checking on the actual video in ‘My Videos’ section, the related video had a status that it has been ‘rejected‘ with a reason of ‘copyright infringement‘ :)

Ok, so the video ‘does‘ have MJ’s song, after all it is a Tribute for ‘him’, for goodness sake! But I didn’t put the song in the video myself, it was there already, and I just documented it.
So, based on this argument, do you think I would have a chance to file a counter-notice?
Speaking about notice, I have another 3 videos, each with different MJ’s song (as you can watch in my last post) being played in its entirety. I wonder, if they will take these down too. Should I deactivate them before they send the notice, or should I wait?
If anybody got past experience on this, I would appreciate the input. Cheers !

Everybody’s familiar with Facebook’s notification/chat toolbar? That was exactly what immediately came to my mind when I saw YouTube RealTime.  Although the beta-test invitation from YouTube did mention something about ‘fancy‘ new toolbar, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise.
Seeing the latest Wave of trend in ‘Real-Time’ platform, I guess it’s just a matter of time that YouTube joined the ‘ride‘. And what YouTube came up with is what it’s called YouTube RealTime (very .. err .. ‘descriptive’ name), which they been beta-testing since April 23rd.

Here are my impressions on the new toolbar, and at the end of the post, we will also give away ‘all’ invites that we have.

Here is how the toolbar looks like:

Similar to Facebook Toolbar, the YouTube RealTime toolbar enables you to see which of your friends are online at the same time. It will also show what your friends have been doing recently in YouTube.  It’s an activity streams which will tell you when your friend make comments, give ratings, favoriting and watching videos. Stalking Mode On :)

On this list, if you hover on one of the friend name, YouTube will show another pop-up, listing recent activities of that user.

Another part of this new feature is the sharing part.  When you are watching a YouTube video, a new tab will appear on the toolbar, called ‘Watching Now‘.  As you might’ve guessed, opening this tab will show you other users who are watching the same video as you are (if they elected to broadcast what they are watching in their privacy option).

At this point, you can also easily share the video you are watching by just clicking on the ‘share‘ button located at the right hand side of each user.  This will pop-up a small message window on your friend’s screen. Or if you really like that video, you might want to ‘Share with all online friends‘.

If at some point you want to explore ‘privately‘ you can just turn off all of these feature easily by clicking on the ‘Realtime Sharing‘ button on the toolbar.  Stealth Mode On :)

The friendship part of YouTube has always been the weakest link, at least for me.  I am currently subscribing to many users, but only a few are friends, compare to Facebook, Twitter or even Flickr.  This is probably because so far there has been no incentive to befriend someone, nothing really special happened apart from maybe the ability to notify a select list of friends only.  Now, with RealTime, there is a reason to friend somebody; instant sharing of what you are watching (read: the power to influence your friends to watch that ‘cat video’ that you really like).  I am talking about uber-viral video recommendation ‘engine’, which can be leveraged by, for example, channel owners to ‘push’ their videos quicker and to wider audiences.

Taking a leaf out of Gmail book, YouTube RealTime is invite only (at the moment).  Everyone who’s got invited can invite another 25 friends.  Though these friends must have a YouTube account already.
Or if you want to invite anybody who doesn’t have a YouTube account, AND at the same time invite them to RealTime, you can use YouTube Peeps.

If you would like an invite, just write a comment with your YouTube account or email address and we will send it your way.

I just got an email from Team Seesmic saying that they just released version 0.2.  Here are the change list from the email:

There are not significant additions, but some of the changes warrant a mention:

• Facebook integration: it’s been there since rc2.
• Twitgoo and Posterous integration, they don’t exactly add a new functionality, but I guess having alternatives are always good.
• Cleaner look and feel: This one is actually quite a visible change, and it does help to tone-down that industrial look.
• Empty error message on protected user lookup, this will definitely help at least to identify what’s going on.

All in all, the only major change since v0.1.2 is the Facebook integration, which if you already installed rc2, is not new anymore.

You can download the new version directly from the following link:

http://d.seesmic.com/seesmic/SeesmicDesktop-0.2.air

Every other major Social Media site seems to try to come up with new design and upgrade their features these days.  So after Facebook, Flickr and recently Twitter, I was’t very surprise when I heard that YouTube is doing it too.

If the last YouTube’s update we more on the video watching side, this time it’s the Channel that gets the make-over!

So, what’s changed ? The hint is on the number 2.0! Yes … rounder corners and Ajax are the two things that you can see dominating the changes.  As a matter of fact, let’s do the ‘Show not Tell’ thing.  In the next two screenshots below, you can see the difference between my existing Channel and the new Beta Channel (click on the thumbnail to view the full image).

Judging from the comments of the blog post above, it seems to me that many users don’t like the changes.  This is of course not surprising.  It happened with Facebook, it happened with Twitter, and it will happen to anything that new.  People just doesn’t seem to like changes.  As for me, I like what I’ve seen, I hate the old Channel design, it looked so 1990.  Mind you, the Beta Channel is, let’s say, Beta :)  There are many things that still don’t work, it’s still very buggy.  But I’m sure they will iron-out these bugs bit by bit.

So, what if you want to participate in the Beta testing? Well, you need to go to this Super Secret link :)  Which will allow you to switch your existing Channel to the new one (don’t worry, you will be able to switch back anytime).

When you click on that blue button, you will be switched to the new Channel Design.

You have to click OK, to enter the Channel.  Then you will see a new Toolbar with buttons that enables you to change the settings of your Channel.  You will also notice the ‘Revert!’ button, which will switch you back your channel to the old design.  The following screenshot will show what settings are under each button (all forms are loaded via Ajax).

The top part of the channel has also a Toolbar which shows the Channel Title, a set of Filters, the Edit link and the View changer.

The filters (All, Uploads, Favorites and Playlists), will change what videos are shown on the main video pane according on what you choose, e.g. choosing Favorites will show only videos that you’ve made favorite.  The Edit link will allow you to edit the setting regarding which set of videos are shown on the video sidebar.

Each module has an edit link too.

A special mention goes to the Recent Activity module, which shows our recent activities (doh!), such as befriending somebody, uploading new video, favoriting a video, subscribing to a channel, and … yes … you can post a bulletin, which basically a Status Update ala Twitter/Facebook.

So, what do you think? Do you like the new design?  I don’t know about you, but I like it.  It looks cleaner and easier to setup.  Granted that is still buggy at the moment, but as I said, they are working on it.

]]> http://mediasosial.com/socialnetworking/super-secret-youtube-channel-20-beta/feed/ 6