Re: Re: Yes, Morfeene!

Hi Perry, it's Tom. Thanks a lot for the response video. As usual, thoughtful and moving the conversation forward. I wanted to clarify some of my thoughts about what you said and about this whole issue of, you know, our relationship with YouTube and, and the problems that have come up here in just what the problems— how we might be able to think about the problems and how they're being approached. In your video, you talked about 3 kinds of relationships that go on here and the relationships that we have with one another, we users, and then the relationship that we have with with YouTube, which you described as dysfunctional, and the relationship that we all have with the technology. Let's start with the first one, because I think the first one is really the key to a lot of what we see in the emotion here. Our relationships with one another are enabled by YouTube and of course enabled by the technology, and it's the, the importance of those relationships that makes YouTube a special place, and that's what they want. Obviously, the, the people who created it wanted to make it a special place, and they've been tremendously successful in doing so, as we can see. And as a result of that success, we have expectations that our ability to retain, to maintain the relationships that we have with folks here will be provided for us by YouTube. It's sort of the unspoken contract. You know, I've seen some people say, hey, you know, it's free, you can't complain, don't complain, it's free. Yes, it's free, but yes, we can complain because the kinds of promises that have been made— make videos, share videos, make comments, share comments, fair rating systems, so on. Those are implicit promises that the companies made to us. We expect that those promises will be met, that they'll be upheld. And when there are problems in the service, those problems disrupt our relationships with one another. So I think those relationships are really very important and kind of at the core. Our relationship with YouTube is the one that we've, we've been addressing. And I think the, um, uh, the expectations that I have at least about communication, uh, are expectations that have been set by what I'm considering to be modern companies, companies that are, um, in the, the internet world and are enabling connections either between people or between people and information that people have come to depend on. And one of those companies is Flickr. Flickr is a photo sharing site and recently purchased by Yahoo, I guess, sometime within the last— is it 12 months? I think in the last 12 months. And Flickr is a service, again, tremendous amount of volume. I don't want to, by the way, I don't want to skip the third relationship, our relationship and YouTube's relationship with technology, but there are other companies that have relationships with technology as well. YouTube's technological challenge may be greater than that faced by any other company today. I'm not, I don't know, you know, terabytes of storage and, you know, amount of data. I know, you know, you hear numbers— 100 million video downloads a day— pretty daunting, seems to me. And they do a great job of keeping the site functional. But there are always going to be problems. We don't expect perfection from the— from any company. I think what we look for is what happens when. You know, what happens when there's a service failure? What happens when the company is— how do they let us know about what's going on? How do they let us know about changes? How do they solicit our thoughts and experiences? I'm not— I don't want to prescribe to them. I have no standing to prescribe to them, but I think that there are ways that other companies— standards that other companies have set that make it interesting to think about how YouTube does in comparison. For example, Flickr. Here's a note that— on the Flickr blog from December 15th, and the title of the blog post is "Intermittent Network Problems." And here's the— Here's what the blog says: If you've been using Flickr today, you might have noticed intermittent problems—slow loading, pages failing to load complete, strange or incomplete results, and things like that. These are the result of networking problems at our primary data center, which have been recurring all day. And all day, we've believed these problems to be at the point of resolution, but then they turn around and bite us again. Ouch. Sort of refreshing, right? As usual, all your photos and data are completely safe. It's reassuring. We use multiple— parentheses— we use multiple data centers which are staffed 24/7, 365, and monitored from several NOCs, centers, network operation centers, around the globe, and have everything backed up live. Again, reassuring. However, while we switch back and forth between the old and new load balancers and networking gear— little Geek talk. The intermittent problems will continue. A dedicated team of hardworking super nerds is working on it now, and we are all quite apologetic. Your continued patience is appreciated, and we should have this resolved soon. Now, I don't know about you, but that would be wonderful to get that kind of communication from YouTube. As far as I'm concerned, if we heard that sort of thing about the comment problem, I'd go, "Hey guys, they told you what the story is. They're working on the story. Enough said." I'd be perfectly happy. I think you'd be perfectly happy. I think most of us would be perfectly happy. So, there's one more. There's one more that I think is pretty interesting. And this one is a blog put out by Google. Google has lots of blogs, by the way, and not just, you know, every once in a while sort of things. Real informative, letting you know what's going on kind of blogs. Here's something about their, their year-end blog. I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'm just going to say, uh, so how else should we look back over the year, uh, with Numerical Bits? Here goes. This post marks the 294th time this year you're reading a post from us, nearly 100 times more than 2005. In the last 12 months, we unveiled 24 new products here. We wrote up 128 product upgrades, new features, and how-to-use-it items. We told you about 7 acquisitions. We blogged about policies or issues 23 times on subjects including Google in China, etc., etc., etc. Um, uh, just— and then they go on to give you more information about, about the year for Google. Again, I'm not, I'm not trying to downplay the technological challenges that are involved in communicating with a large user community, which has, as you say, the potential to generate 500,000 views of a video put up by Chad or Steve saying whatever it is they would say. I'm just suggesting that the company needs to figure out what kind of company it wants to be and communicate in that fashion. I think they want to be a company that extends the innovation that we see on the technical side to its relationships with us. It turns them into something beyond just a technical repository. We know it's that because of the relationships that we've developed with one another. So thanks for your thoughts as always, and, you know, I hope that what we're gonna see is a more functional relationship, you know, maybe one along the lines that we saw in the Flickr communication style, which just gives us enough information to let us know that they're working on things that we believe they're working on, we hope they're working on, that we know they're working on them, and maybe give us some idea of what we might expect from them. So thanks a lot. See you again soon. Bye.