YouTube is a community website built around the concept of sharing videos. If you’ve ever tried emailing small video clips to your friends or family, you’ll understand how quickly it becomes frustrating to upload them. As opposed to video download sites, YouTube lets you watch videos on the site itself, through its own Flash based interface. This is first of all a great way to put your videos up on the web where other people can see them, and be sure they can’t download copies of them. YouTube will work very well for you if you want to publish or share your videos with the rest of the world.

You don’t have to be a member of the site to browse through videos or play them. Members can thus upload videos, and send a unique link pointing to the page that video is on to anyone they want. Members can even put their hosted videos up on their own websites, so not only can people share videos with friends and family, but bloggers and online professionals can also publish videos that they would otherwise be unable to put on their own websites.

Videos are categorized and sorted by genres known as “channels”, an interesting arrangement. The channels range from Arts & Animation to Sports, Short Movies and Videoblogging. There’s even a channel called Personals & Dating, where users can view video profiles that members have uploaded in the hope of meeting that someone special. Of course you can also browse through videos sorted in a number of ways – most viewed, most recently uploaded, most discussed, top rated and random. The featured videos listed on the front page are actually recommended by users who stumble across videos and think they’re worthy of the honor.

Registered users, in addition to browsing, can also add the videos they come across to their individual “favorites” list for later viewing. They can even build playlists out of any video on the site and share them with others. Users can subscribe to other users to automatically receive notifications when they upload new content. This makes videoblogging with YouTube an attractive prospect, since all the work is taken care of and all you have to do is supply the content.

The kind of videos you’ll find on YouTube range from the utterly banal to the astonishingly creative. There are clips of people doing absolutely nothing or of traffic passing in the street outside someone’s window. There are also entire short films, music videos and mashups that people have produced independently and have taken a great deal of trouble over. And in addition to video blogs, there are a number of regular content providers hosting professionally created video, such as the comedy group ‘Improv Anywhere’ and music labels trying to promote independent artistes. Anyone can flag a video as obscene or inappropriate, and it can be deleted after scrutiny if it is found to violate the site’s terms of service.

It’s great that corporates have taken to online services like this and are using them to reach out to people all over the world in a non-obtrusive way. If the site’s creators didn’t imagine something like this happening when they launched it, they must be quite pleased with themselves now.

But what’s more important than any of this is the user experience. Videos start playing as soon as the page loads, which is great if you have a broadband connection but quickly becomes annoying if you don’t have enough bandwidth available. There’s no way to increase the buffer size or download the entire video before starting to play it. Even with a (supposed) 256Kb/s broadband connection, I couldn’t enjoy a lot of the longer videos. I wound up turning off the sound and working on something else in a different browser tab while a video choked and stuttered through to the end, and then watching them properly by clicking “play again”.

Uploading a video also takes time. Users must enter a title and description for the clip, give it at least one tag and select any of the predefined video channels to categorize it in. You are warned not to upload copyrighted or “obscene” material and can choose whether the video will be available to the general public or not. YouTube can handle most major video formats, but will reformat them and probably use some sort of compression to keep file storage overheads down.