Our days are numbered

Last night was our last feature release in this office. That's right, we're moving on to bigger, less rat infested digs next week. I can't even begin to tell you what a crazy ride it's been this past year and moving out of this, our first real office, has definitely been a little emotional for me. But more sappiness and nostalgia later. Tomorrow we're having a last day in the office shin dig and we'll be sure to post some videos from that.



So, what were we doing here until the wee hours of the morning last night? Launching a few new features. First off, QuickLists. The idea for QuickLists actually came from us watching users open up multiple browser windows so they could 'load up' a bunch of videos to watch later. Well, ⌘ N no more. See those little + icons on all the video images? Clicking on it will add that video to a list that is saved for later viewing. You can access your QuickList at anytime by clicking on the link at the top of every page, or by clicking the QuickList bar under any video you watch. You can watch all the videos in your QuickList at once by clicking 'play all', and if you want to keep the list permanently you can save it as a PlayList.



We've also been working diligently to combat two issues that have been somewhat plaguing YouTube lately - abusive flaggers and spammers. We get a lot of emails about both problems, and although we're not able to respond to everyone individually, please be rest assured that we are actively working on both of these issues and developing ways to abolish this type of abuse from the site. It's one of our highest priorities right now and we promise that in the coming weeks there will be much continued improvement in these areas.



In other news, The Underground contest is now accepting submissions. We've all spent countless (and I mean countless) hours this past week watching the entries and there are some truly amazing ones. Submissions are open until 10/18, so if you're a musician get your butt in gear and go make a video!



Best,

Maryrose

The YouTube Team

Greetings, YouTubers!

My name is Mia (I won't bother with the 12-syllable last name) and I'm the new czarina of programming. Huh, you say? Basically, that means a big part of my job is making sure we are finding and featuring the best videos in the YouTube universe – your original videos that never cease to amaze me with their creativity, senses of humor and, sometimes, strangeness.



I'm closing in on my second week here, and already I love working at YouTube (and it's not just the Oreos that call my name daily from the pantry behind me). In fact, you might think it's amazing I didn't run from the building on my first day, when I was greeted by an engineer snoring on a couch and I heard about The Rats (who better not touch my Oreos!).



Now I've worked at some pretty neat non-rat-infested places – MTV Networks, Rhapsody and Apple – but rarely have I felt such an immediate connection to the people who actually use the product. We feature a video, and you instantly tell us what you think about it. We can watch you acting silly, see what an awesome drummer you are, meet your whole family, and go deep inside your world on a daily basis. I can't think of anything much cooler than that.



So I'm really excited to be here and hope you'll continue to be as vocal as you are. Click here
to send me an email with suggestions of videos you think we should feature or to tell me about a new clip you've just uploaded or a new talent you've just discovered on the site. We may not be able to feature everything you send us, but we'll certainly pay close attention to what you're thinking and doing. After all, that's the YouTube way!




Yours 'Tube-ly,


Mia

The YouTube Team

Underground

We love our indie musicians at YouTube. Their spirit, creativity and often raw talent make for some of the best content on our site. I'm always filled with glee when someone tells me they 'discovered' a new band on YouTube. As a life long music junkie and avid supporter of local music scenes I take great personal pleasure in being part of something that can help indie musicians bring visibility to their music in a whole new way. We're constantly working to find new ways for musicians to promote themselves and connect to each other, so it's with great excitement that we announce our first-ever contest – The YouTube Underground (well, besides all those goofy contests we did last year, but nevermind that). It's pretty simple, really: if you're a musician, make a video, enter it in the contest and the YouTube community will vote for their favorites. Four grand prize winners will get a whole lot'o stuff, including:

All-new equipment from Gibson Guitar

Roundtrip airfare to New York City and lodging

Use of Gibson's pimped-out tour bus

Appearance on Good Morning America

Photo shoots and interviews

Video featured on YouTube

and of course...the envy of all eyes.



So go make videos, musicians! This is your chance to shine like the rock star you were always meant to be.



Maryrose

The YouTube Team

The Deal with Warner

No doubt you've read the news about the partnership we announced with
Warner. This is great news for the YouTube community!



Up front, let me say that the details will be worked out
with Warner, its recording artists and YouTube over the next few months. Our
goal is to provide you with the most entertaining service and more creative
options.



The cool thing is that Warner will be posting top music videos,
interviews with your favorite artists and behind-the-scenes footage, and
more. You'll be able to enjoy and share these videos without concern that
they could be removed.



What's even better is that Warner is the first record label to
embrace and support your creativity by authorizing use of their
music content for free, in partnership with your favorite artists! This new
architecture will be available by the end of the year. We will have more
details to share then.



Meanwhile, we love hearing from you and want to know how we can
continue to be the best way to share your talent with a growing
audience.



Cheers,

Powers

The YouTube Team

A few new things

We took the site down tonight to do some maintenance and to push out a few new features. The new features are obviously more fun to talk about than the maintenance so here it goes:



Custom Channel URLS: Have you ever tried to tell people how to find you on youtube? "Go to youtube.com/profile? errrr...I think then you put user = or wait, is it user?...maybe just do a search." Well, now you can create your own customized channel url which will be simply youtube.com/name. Your custom URL can be your username or what ever name you want with a few exceptions - you can't pick someone else's username and you can't pick any words that would make your mother stick a bar of soap in your mouth.



My Account: We've been continuing to enhance the My Account page over the past couple of weeks. This is the one consolidated place for all your stuff - your account settings, inbox, channel information, videos, favorites and more. We also added a dropdown with some quick links to your most important things from the My Account link in the upper right hand corner.



Eye Candy: We're starting to pretty up some little things here and there on the site. Nothing too fancy, but you may notice new buttons in embeds and at the end of a video.



We also quietly launched a few new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. Come back in a few days to see what's been cooking.



One other thing, while the amount of spam I get to my email account steadily increases, I'd still like to get more feedback emails from all of you. I may not be able to respond to each and every email - but I really do read them all. Please continue to send me your thoughts, ideas and feedback, no matter how random or absurd, we want to hear it all.



Best,

Maryrose

The YouTube Team

Growing Pains

YouTube was down today from approximately 7AM to 1PM. There's really no enticing story to tell here, we weren't hacked and we weren't pushing new features. Simply put, our primary database crashed. We did make a very intentional decision to not immediately fail over to our redundant database but to instead bring up both databases simultaneously to ensure we had absolutely no data loss. Although we may have lengthened the time of our outage to do this, our number one priority was to not compromise our users' content in any way.



Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience the outage may have caused you. We can confidently say that the site is now completely restored and that we're working around the clock (literally, just ask our ops team) to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen in the future.



We will be taking a planned downtime this Thursday night to address some of the issues from today's outage as well push out some new features, so check back here in a few days for a more exciting update. 



Maryrose

The YouTube Team

Keeping it Real

Want to know what it's really like to work at YouTube? Check out this video of Chris (our head of BizDev no less) hunting down that stinky smell in the office.
The fun never ceases at YouTube! :)



For all my fellow animal lovers - we did NOT set up those horrible rat traps, they were left in our office by the old tenants. I'm personally quite fond of rats.



Maryrose

The YouTube Team