VIMEO

After the dawn and wild success of youtube, video upload sites have popped up all over the internet. Poor quality, slow uploading, cumbersome interface, low user interaction, heavyset restrictions ... they all try to offer something "special" that the other does not have. Signing up for countless video sites and uploading a video or two during the past two years, I forget about them, they shut down, or I can't get a grip on their design. It was amazing how fast Youtube shot off past the oblivion of lame websites into something frequented upon by the masses. My gripe on youtube is the horrendous upload quality. Sure, they get thousands upon thousands of uploads daily - their servers must be running out the door - but quality, please. It's good that they are trying to up the quality now. Another great feature they released is viewer location statistics ... which is semi-hepful and interesting to look at.

I have found that Vimeo is a great alternative to youtube ... but it shouldn't necessarily take the place of it. Vimeo's quality is beautiful, interface is crip, and it has a nice community base. It has this sort of "small town" feel in comparison to Youtube's tokyo train station inundation. Vimeo's browsing feature is lacking, but that's what favourite lurking and channel subscriptions are for. (I love favourite lurking ... it is becoming my favourite "im bored" past times when my RSS feeds run dry) In a way, Vimeo is like the flickr of videos (minus the "paying for unlimited uploads" and the send-to-group feature [Vimeo's got the "Channels" feature, but only Admin of that channel can add videos]). Though Vimeo has a 500mb-per-week upload allowance, it is plenty enough to upload almost whatever you want that you created.





I WISH FLICKR WOULD OPEN UP A VIDEO UPLOAD SECTION OF ITS OWN. That would be amazing to see video uploads integrated with pictures ... in the same stream, able to be submitted to groups, downloaded, tagged, geotagged, added to sets and collections, and such. I would totally pay more for the feature.