The Youtube 2012 April Fool’s day prank!

Google is quite famous for its creative mischief on every April fool’s day. And this year was no different. Among other pranks, I liked this one by Youtube – The entire Youtube Collection on DVD! The Youtube 2012 April Fool’s day prank video is embedded below.

 

Just in case you missed, they used this opportunity to mock many things. Watch the video carefully!

Imagine sending a fleet of 175 trucks loaded with DVD’s of all the videos ever uploaded to Youtube till now! They even offer to organize the multiple cartons containing the DVD’s into a system of Nested Cartons. So, you need to open the ‘How to’ bigger carton, and then ‘How to open’ smaller carton……. till you get the video of your choice. Too bad, they were not able to find a faster offline search technique to find videos faster 😉

I searched in Youtube to find if there is any real tutorial on how to open a milk carton, and there is!!!. Among others, a self addressed envelope (postage paid by receiver?) is provided to send your comments and a like/dislike hand cardboard symbol to a Youtube video creator! The ‘FIRST’ is too hilarious 🙂 Not sure if the creators can reply in a similar fashion! If these comments could be sent by post to everyone who ‘comments’, perhaps one can have something closer to the real Youtube experience!! LOL. BTW, Minecraft tutorials gets a whole box! 🙂

The video was definitely fun, but what about spending some time to make some real improvements to Youtube as well?

Among others, we want:

  • A Stop button that can stop loading the video at any point. Sometimes, we just want to load the first two minutes of a video and then decide if we want to continue. Yes, some of us are bandwidth starved!
  • Comment moderation – Why don’t you allow the video creators to moderate comments? Have you noticed the trash that people type into the comment box just because they have an anonymous google account? How about verifying a google account with their mobile phone numbers and then allowing them to comment?
  • Introduce some low-bandwidth viewing choices. HD is not the only video format and not everyone has enough bandwidth to watch HD videos. Why not enable users to see videos in smaller video resolutions like QVGA, etc?
  • Youtube should stop suggesting videos (based on previous views) on the home page. Do you do that with the home page of google search? Instead, you can give a large button that says, ‘Suggest me videos’. I am not sure if I’d want Youtube to remember all the videos I watch and that too by default!
  • Improve the categorization of videos. Have you seen how Amazon categorizes its various products? Learn from them.

Of course, there are so many positive points to say about Youtube, but that would require many pages to write. I generally love their **free** service to the mankind (including the free ads) 🙂

Destination Infinity

13 thoughts on “The Youtube 2012 April Fool’s day prank!

  1. Sandhya Kumar

    The video is interesting!

    We get to watch good videos only after watching the ‘free’ ad! Boring!
    But I like you tube. We can get anything and everything from it. Yes, I too don’t like it to ‘suggest’ things, all the time.

    How did you think of doing this post? Interesting!

    1. Rajesh K

      But they need to monetize their service by some way, no? I am actually ok with those ads as long as they are short. Actually, I wanted to write about the improvements that I wanted to see in Youtube and yesterday I came across this video. So, I thought why not combine them both?

      Destination Infinity

  2. msr

    You can right-click on the video and choose ‘Stop download’ to stop streaming.

    1. Rajesh K

      Thanks for that input, I tried it and it works. So, this feature was already there and I didn’t know!

      Destination Infinity

  3. Reema

    Hadnt seen it!! thanks for the video 🙂

    1. Rajesh K

      I wonder what we would have thought if we saw that video without knowing that it was a prank. I saw one more by their driver-less car team on participating in a race, and I thought it was a true promotional technique!

      Destination Infinity

  4. Vaish

    Do they even have a video to tell how to open milk carton and juice bottles!

    1. Vaish

      And they should seriously develop another video that says how to use your brain and use your common sense!

    2. Rajesh K

      I think it was a video that mocked the way people open their milk cartons and of course, taught them the right way to do it. I think it was made for fun. Looked like that.

      Destination Infinity

  5. Aiz

    they do these and all on april 1 ! i didn’t know that

    its funny. and i second the stop button point and the history point

    1. Rajesh K

      For stopping, you can right click on the video and choose ‘stop download’, it seems.

      Destination Infinity

  6. Rahul Aggarwal

    i completely agree with all the points you mentioned on how google can improve youtube!!!

    1. Rajesh K

      The first point, I think is addressed by a commenter. The rest of the points, yes youtube might have to look at them.

      Destination Infinity

Leave a Reply to Vaish Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *