Henry Jenkins wrote a fabulous blog post on YouTube back in May of 2007 (click here to read). Reading his post over 4 years after he wrote it, it is almost eerie how accurate he was on many of the things that he has said. The point that resonated the most with me was #4, where he says that YouTube’s highest value is it’s “spreadability”. He specifically talked about social networks. While Facebook was not the phenomenon in 2007 that it is now, I found two cute YouTube videos that clearly show how intertwined Facebook and YouTube now are.
Ross Gardiner (a writer, who actually has some cute short stories on his website here) seems to think that Facebook is bad, but he understands that the popularity of his video is going to stream from viewers who watch his video from Facebook:
http://youtu.be/8UouP8cRYZ8
This young woman is amazing. I actually like her video more, but it does not make sense unless you watch the previous video.
While I find it annoying to read pieces of paper in videos, they both have very good points, and their clips are cute. These two videos are clear examples of how intermingled Facebook and YouTube are. YouTube is not that only source that is linked into Facebook. These days everything is. Word of mouth is one of the most valuable sources of advertising there is. Sites such as Textsfromlastnight and Fmylife have gotten big because of their popularity from Facebook. While I have no doubt that Facebook would have done well on it’s own, making their videos linkable to other sites was genius, and has made YouTube indispensable.
Jenkins, a professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts at USC, is a self proclaimed ACA fan, which he describes as a part fan, part academic. He has written about a dozen books on media and culture. For his complete bio on himself, see his website at: http://www.henryjenkins.org/aboutme.html