IP Democracy: Google, AOL Aim to Imitate YouTube

YouTube came out of nowhere and rose like a rocket and now the race is on to replicate YouTube’s success. AOL yesterday unveiled a social networking service that is a YouTube-inspired offering.

The beta service is called AOLUncut and the reviews are already Unkind. The bottom-line criticism: Uncut is derivative and can’t expect to catch up with the innovative original.

Over at TechCrunch Michael Arrington says that this is typical of big company thinking these days — take a pioneer’s success and emulate it.

I am seeing an increasing trend of the big guys simply copying what successful startups are doing. AOL with this product and AIM Pages. Google with Google Notebook and a flurry of other projects, etc. The only large company that is even experimenting with unproven concepts at this point is Microsoft with its various Live.com ideas. I’d like to see more experimenting at the big company level.

Unfortunately, while that may have worked in years past with standard consumer products, the Internet and social networking and Web 2.0 applications are different creatures entirely. Google has learned this lesson - the company announced today that its Google Video service (which really isn’t a YouTube imitator but is nonetheless compared to YouTube nowadays) is being upgraded to be more like YouTube.

Among the enhancements are a retooling that eliminates the need for users to download special software so that they can upload videos. Google will also shorten the lag between the time a user uploads a video and when that video appears on the site.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 17, 2006 11:44 AM to IP Democracy