A few new things

We took the site down tonight to do some maintenance and to push out a few new features. The new features are obviously more fun to talk about than the maintenance so here it goes:



Custom Channel URLS: Have you ever tried to tell people how to find you on youtube? "Go to youtube.com/profile? errrr...I think then you put user = or wait, is it user?...maybe just do a search." Well, now you can create your own customized channel url which will be simply youtube.com/name. Your custom URL can be your username or what ever name you want with a few exceptions - you can't pick someone else's username and you can't pick any words that would make your mother stick a bar of soap in your mouth.



My Account: We've been continuing to enhance the My Account page over the past couple of weeks. This is the one consolidated place for all your stuff - your account settings, inbox, channel information, videos, favorites and more. We also added a dropdown with some quick links to your most important things from the My Account link in the upper right hand corner.



Eye Candy: We're starting to pretty up some little things here and there on the site. Nothing too fancy, but you may notice new buttons in embeds and at the end of a video.



We also quietly launched a few new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. Come back in a few days to see what's been cooking.



One other thing, while the amount of spam I get to my email account steadily increases, I'd still like to get more feedback emails from all of you. I may not be able to respond to each and every email - but I really do read them all. Please continue to send me your thoughts, ideas and feedback, no matter how random or absurd, we want to hear it all.



Best,

Maryrose

The YouTube Team

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Growing Pains

YouTube was down today from approximately 7AM to 1PM. There's really no enticing story to tell here, we weren't hacked and we weren't pushing new features. Simply put, our primary database crashed. We did make a very intentional decision to not immediately fail over to our redundant database but to instead bring up both databases simultaneously to ensure we had absolutely no data loss. Although we may have lengthened the time of our outage to do this, our number one priority was to not compromise our users' content in any way.



Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience the outage may have caused you. We can confidently say that the site is now completely restored and that we're working around the clock (literally, just ask our ops team) to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen in the future.



We will be taking a planned downtime this Thursday night to address some of the issues from today's outage as well push out some new features, so check back here in a few days for a more exciting update. 



Maryrose

The YouTube Team

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Keeping it Real

Want to know what it's really like to work at YouTube? Check out this video of Chris (our head of BizDev no less) hunting down that stinky smell in the office.
The fun never ceases at YouTube! :)



For all my fellow animal lovers - we did NOT set up those horrible rat traps, they were left in our office by the old tenants. I'm personally quite fond of rats.



Maryrose

The YouTube Team

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Our Terms of Use Clarified

You may have seen some of the blogs out there talking about our 'new' Terms of Use that would supposedly allow us to sell any videos our users uploaded to the site. Before going further, allow me to clarify: YouTube has never had the rights to sell, nor do we have any intention to sell, our users’ content. Plain and Simple.



These blogs posted a section from our Terms of Use completely out of context omitting a few key sentences (always be mindful of those darn ellipses). The section in question is quoted below and the sentences in bold were the ones omitted. If you don't want to read all that boring legalize, here are the CliffsNotes:

You keep ALL the rights to your videos.

We have the right to syndicate the content of our website. We have to have this to allow for our embed and API functionality.

As soon as you remove your video from YouTube, we lose all rights to redistribute or syndicate that video in any way. So once your video is gone from the site, we cannot do a thing with that content.

Terms of Use Section 5 (B):



For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website.



Hopefully this clarifies matters and puts any unrest at ease about who owns the rights to your videos on YouTube. YOU own the rights to your videos.



Best,

Maryrose

The YouTube Team

More about → Our Terms of Use Clarified