Wildfalcon

Have you ever wanted to share something personal with just a few, or even just one close friend. Its really not easy. I’m not talking about an idea, something you can just ring up and tell them. I’m thinking of videos (though the idea extends to photos, or music, or any thing like that). Because its not easy, I think a lot of you end up not doing it, and thats a shame.

I spent today working on this problem. My dance partner and I had someone record us at a competition at the weekend. I want to share the videos with her, but not with the whole world. After all, what if someone in Australia sees it and doesn’t like our dancing! I didn’t want to burn a copy of the CD and give it to her. Mainly because I just had a foot operation, and so can’t get out of bed. That aside though, some sort of internet sharing is just so much more elegant, and being a computer geek, i want elegance when doing this sort of thing.

So video sharing, of course, means YouTube. Does YouTube allow me to share a video with just one person? It turns out it does, but falls very short on my elegance desires. I won’t bore you with all the details, but by the time I had set the video up to not be publicly viewable, and informed YouTube who, other than myself, should be able to view the video, I had formed a somewhat less than favorable view of the administration interface that YouTube provides.

I think this is really quite a big deal. The easier something is to do, the more I am willing to do it. Facebook makes tagging people in a photo really easy, so I tag photos in Facebook. My photo-library software though, just isn’t as good, its not bad, its just not *as* good, so I don’t tag photos in it. If I could easily send a video message to a group of people, and be sure only they get it, then I probably would.

The thing thats really important to me here is the idea of how confident I feel doing this. The more I trust the people I am sending my content to, and the more I trust the security of the system, the more open I will be, and the better the quality of the communication will be. I find I do trust YouTube (for now), but the lack of simplicity in their interface leads me to believe they either do not want, or do not care about user to user communication. I did use them today for my videos, but it did not leave me with the warm fuzzy feeling that they care about me. Nor did it leave me wanting to try sending videos to other friends.

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