YouTube's success has prompted numerous me2 sites, some which include various media conglomerates own efforts to build their own version. Here's a site that doesn't appear to be at the moment linked to any large company. It's basically another version of YouTube, with a crappier interface. I'm being harsh just in case they read it, they get a blunt, albeit honest opinion.
The interface is REALLY rough. First, there's too much "back-and-forth" web 1.0 action. Not enough dynamic pieces to make it convenient. The worst part is the whole lack of caching content on the browser side, which in turn makes the constant page reloading effort a real hassle. Say you're watching a large video and suddenly you press a link thinking that you might be able to interact in an AJAX manner. Chances are that you'll be sent to another page and you'll be forced to reload the whole video from start. That's terrible and a real pain.
Similarly, another problem I found was that the file I was watching stopped abruptly when there clearly was another 7 minutes of watching time left. I couldn't tell if the reason why it stopped was because of my stupid router shutting down or if the content was misread in terms of time. But it was quite annoying to say the least. I know YouTube has similar problems from time-to-time but the browser side caching of their content helps alleviate part of this problem, allowing me to reload the page and try to watch a clip again.
Another terrible feature in terms of the interface is the way-too-sensitive playlist sidebar. It's embedded in a frame. But you just need to click once on an image to get a video to play inside the player. Sounds nice, until you realize that you've accidentally started up a video and are forced to reload your previous video from scratch again. There's no way to lock this interface down so that you can just view the video you want.
The layout looks nice, but I don't see anything special. It's prettier in some ways than YouTube in terms of the colors, but truthfully, I find the interface to really downgrade my experience.
One feature that seems nice is that you can download videos straight to your PC....if you're willing to install their player. I find this to be a travesty. Only Macs and Windows users can employ this feature. I run Ubuntu and Fedora (although I have a Windows based PC as well), but why would I want to install yet another crappy player? I was pretty reluctant to install Amazon's player for their unbox software. I also got AOL's version and I'm suspicious of it. Why not just let users download the damn files as .avi's? I mean, if you're already going to allow users to download them, just go all the way. They did provide an option for iPod formatted files, but after I grabbed the file, it turned out unreadable. Very sad.
There were a few videos that I found that were not on YouTube. I won't say what they were (NOT pr0n!!!!) but it makes me believe that the lifespan of such a site will be short as big media companies will more than likely set their targets on them once they dispense of other players.
If this site/company wants to succeed against youtube, they need to focus on user experience. Anyone these days can create another youtube, but few can transform the experience into a more successful one for people. That factor is what will keep YouTube ahead of the competition.
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