YouTube Mobile first impressions
Rating: small
by Bena Roberts
YouTube goes mobile on m.youtube.com.
The mobile site is a small darker (it’s black) version of the online YouTube with vertical search functionality pointing to the best, most featured, etc. To make discovery easy. There is a small search box but only a small percentage of videos are available… see two screen shots below. The second appeared as I tried to find our face of user generated mobile content Hannah Finlay aka Chickster 1989.
There is a great write up about the m.youtube name vs a .mobi account from Russell Beattie at Mowser. We are not sure that we completely agree with Russell and personally it seems as though there is a global divide with the mobi and m. mobile URLs. The Europeans, it seems prefer .mobi.
What we think
We hate black mobile sites – they look awful. I think that Google YouTube is going in the right direction but missing out on a huge revenue stream by not offering any other mobile interaction on the m.youtube site. This is a mistake as without interaction you can’t build a mobile community and what works online does not always work on mobile. Virgin’s hot or not services are heavily integrated to its Bite portal with SMS, MMS and chat interaction – this is clearly missing.
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