Users Helping Users

The first announcement is an extension of what YouTube has already been doing in allowing users to submit their own help videos. YouTube chooses the ones they liked best and applied them to their appropriate sections in the Help Center.

They have now decided to keep the ability to submit help videos as a standing feature on YouTube. Users can submit them at any time by going to the Help Center and going to the upload gadget in the top right-hand corner.

"Pick the entry you think is funny, incomplete, too short, whatever! You can share tips you’ve discovered while using YouTube, tell your story through a funny sketch, a song, an animation — we’re sure you can come up with lots more ideas than us!" says Colin W. the Help Center Guru of the YouTube Help Team. "We’ll take a look at what you put together and will embed the ones that best accompany each article right there on the Help Center, where millions of YouTube users will see it."

Mashing it Up

The second announcement is for developers interested in including YouTube in their mashups.

"You may have noticed that YouTube became more social a couple of months ago with the addition of the "Recent Activity" box to YouTube channels," explains Stephanie Liu of the YouTube APIs and Tools Team. "Well, the YouTube API is now following suit by providing activity feeds for integration into other apps and sites. Before you ask, the API respects all privacy settings, so the user still has complete control over what does or does not appear in the feed."

Liu has linked to the following resources for further details on this:

- YouTube API Blog post
- Protocol guide
- PHP guide
- Java guide
- Activity viewer sample in PHP (source)

YouTube’s announcement reflects its dedication to the user experience. This has been a continuing theme with YouTube and Google in general. While there are certainly beefs between users and Google, you can’t say they don’t provide extensive resources on how to better use their products from their array of blogs to their help centers.

They called for videos in categories such as captions and subtitles, editing videos, making playlists, uploading videos, customizing channels, contact lists, transferring from cameras to computers, etc. Users will happy to help, and now YouTube is sharing a few of the submissions that made it to the help center:

One for "Editing My Video"

One for "Transferring from Camera to Computer"

 One for "Emebedding Videos"

It’s not over though. YouTube says that pretty soon they will be opening up the Help Center in its entirety. This means that if you would like to make a video for it, but didn’t want to use any of the categories previously listed, you will still have a chance to participate.

The user videos are a nice way for YouTube to get other people to do their work, but they also make the Help Center a little more human than it would probably be otherwise. And it is no secret that help centers in general could always be a little more human.

Users can report things like community guidelines violations, privacy issues, sexual abuse, hateful content, suicide, cyberbullying, impersonating, spam and phishing, etc. They can also get tips about how to handle different situations.

"The center features straightforward safety tips and multimedia resources from experts and prominent safety organizations," says the YouTube Team. "We are empowering people with the information and tools they need to help them deal with issues like cyberbullying, online harassment, and hateful content.

YouTube has shown it really cares about abuse and safety lately. Apart from this, they have gotten stricter with their policy on sexually suggestive content, and encouraged users to report minor violence. Now users have a place to go when any problems arise, as well as a useful resource for keeping their YouTube experience wholesome. It should be very useful to protective parents.