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I will say that I'm not a huge fan of YouTube. I would rather see people investing in themselves and their own online presence, than see the web dotted by a relatively few sites like YouTube and FaceBook which command a ton of traffic, and are potentially hugely profitable, but for a very small group of people.

The paradigm simply does not play to the distributed nature of the web, and as a result is fraught with all of the disadvantages of traditional sales and distribution models. Oh yeah, it also doesn't seem particularly fair that owners of sites like YouTube, whose success is based almost entirely on value of user submitted content, reap nearly all of the rewards related to the success of the site. The applicable technology is certainly nothing particularly special. If it weren't for the considerable first mover advantage and the momentum that attracts a commanding share of the potential audience, there might easily be dozens of YouTubes. Other's have certainly tried and have failed not because of technical limitations or an inability to match YouTube on the basis of functionality and features, but because they were unable to duplicate the wealth of content available at youtube.com. Sure YouTube assumes no small amount of risk and expense and is certainly deserving of compensation and their fair share of the profits, when/if there are any at all to be had, but I can understand why there is little to no discussion about allowing content providers to directly share in the success of the site. It's as if mere exposure is enough. The trouble is that without youtube exposure wouldn't be contingent on youtube. We've seen this sort of thing before. Ticketmaster comes to mind, but there are many other examples. In fact that history of nearly every talent-based/creative industry seems to start like this.

• Concentration of authority with a select few leading to consolidation of choice in a way that benefits only a few at the expense of everyone else.

  Leading to a landscape dominated by the opinions, and sensibilities and of a select few.

• Dangerous, single points of failure and bottlenecks.

• Out of control costs and resource requirements which threaten to create what are essentially defacto monopolies. Is everyone out there satisfied with their cable company, ISP, and phone company?[1] Then you should also be uncomfortable in a world where online video is synonymous with YouTube, search = Google, eBay is the only viable place to buy and sell online (Craigslist is eBay too), and Facebook is the social networking platform.

Of course, not to be lost in all of this are policies of copyright holders that seem to mirror political protectionism and which seems just as out of touch with current trends.

[1] How depressing is it that for a lot of people there is a single provider responsible for all of these services? Yes I understand the arguments in favor of consolidation but the fact is that customer satisfaction is way down and those first year teaser rates offered by places like Comcast last only long enough to negatively impact the competition. After a year, or in some cases as little as 1 - 3 months, the rates go back up, customer services stays in the s*#t, and the alternatives dwindle away. There is no free market economy, in the US or anywhere else, in the absence of competition.

What's the alternative? Well you may not have a lot of choice when it comes to your cable provider but you certainly can (and probably should) choose not to use Facebook.

Weblogs are far more functional and flexible, and best of all you are in control. You can be confident knowing that without a doubt you will have access to your weblog (or at least the content), and more to the point all of the time and effort it represents, 5 years from now. The same thing can't be said for Facebook. Think Facebook will be around and important in 5 years? Consider that it didn't exist 5 years ago and that before Facebook was Facebook, MySpace and Friendster were both Facebook. Still confident? Then consider Beacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_(Facebook), which is just one of several serious missteps made by this guy and the rest of Facebook bunch.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/05/12/Facebooks-Growing-Pains

I'd rather see the YouTube founders and Zuckerbergs of the world working on services to stitch together a web of content (that's why the web is called the web kids). Imagine a scenario in which I post my text, photos, and videos to my own site and YouTube is a service that collects together all of the distributed content on the web (in the same way that search engines work now) and works to publicize me and my content, not the site itself. Once upon a time there were portals, and this is precisely what they did.

What's the difference? Such a service promotes your content it doesn't control your content. Furthermore the service builds on the foundation of the web it doesn't co-opt it. Facebook is essentially a web running on top of the web. What's wrong with that? A lot.

The web is distributed across millions of servers; facebook isn't The web is open; facebook isn't The web is reliable; facebook isn't The web is designed as a platform to enable widespread collaboration among among essentially everyone on the planet; facebook is ultimately an advertising platform. The web looks like this

http://www.vlib.us/web/worldwideweb3d.html

Facebook looks like this

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/05/12/Facebooks-Growing-Pains

The web is a lopsided produced/consumer oriented media marketplace. I prefer the original vision of a shared collaborative space with easy and dynamic connections between content and services emphasizing persistence.

Facebook will fad fade. The internet and the web will live on and evolve. Where will your data be? 10 years from now are you going to be looking back on all of your posts, photos, videos, etc as treasured memories or are you going to be looking back with no small amount of regret over what you lost when Facebook went away.