YouTube Joins Beer Bongs In College Students' Tube Collections

Ramblings

from the youtube.edu dept

One of the key differences between MySpace and Facebook is that the former is a totally open network, whereas the latter is geared towards building several smaller networks, primarily centered around universities. There’s obviously merit in both approaches. But more companies seem to be interested in the Facebook, closed network, approach, even for non-social networking applications. Six Apart recently announced its new blogging platfrom call Vox, which emphasizes privacy for one’s blog, and today YouTube announced it would take a page out of the Facebook playbook by allowing users to restrict content to others from the same .edu domain. The announcement is being portrayed as a move into Facebook’s space, which isn’t entirely accurate, as it will do little to impact Facebook’s bread-and-butter business of helping college students hook up with each other. But it is an acknowledgment that for some types of video content, students may wish to target it specifically to others at the school. Of course, one of the key features of YouTube is the ability to embed videos on other sites, like a blog. It seems like they’d have to disable this very popular feature for the plan to work, which might ultimately doom the whole plan.