Ampers & Dot

YouTube announced this week that it’s launching a real-time search engine for video comments. Or, as I’m calling it, the worst idea of the week (and, as that post points out, this is Balloon Boy week… so that’s really saying something).

YouTube is likely looking for a way to keep up with the buzzwordiest term of the month, “Real-Time”, and while it already has features to let you see new videos in real-time, giving its users the ability to search through recent comments as soon as they are posted might have been the next logical step. Now I’m not sure if you’ve recently read any YouTube comments, but if there one thing we don’t need immediately it’s incessant trolling.

Comments on YouTube videos represent just about all that is wrong with the internet. There’s constant spamming, derogatory sexism, racism, homophobia, and just awful hate - not to mention worse grammar and spelling than two monkeys playing scrabble… in a foreign language. With letters that somehow only spell swear words. I feel dirty just thinking about some of the comments I’ve seen on YouTube videos.

xkcd, as always, has a great take on the problem:

Why would we need to get to this mess of the web quicker? Take a look at the screenshot from YouTube’s announcement - who would want to see those comments in the first place? Not everything needs to be real-time.

There’s a justified rush to conquer the real-time web - it’s the source of what’s driving most online innovation and I think a lot of good is coming from it. I mean, the reason I like Twitter is because it’s the best source for right-now answers. It’s become my real-time search engine. But YouTube comments that just happened? I can wait…

Of course there is one worthwhile use-case: social media monitoring. Marketers that track their products/brands/campaigns will have an easier time getting live results from YouTube comments - which, let’s face it, probably won’t be positive comments. But this also presents marketers with the new challenge of another real-time channel. Just as quickly as they can discover comments, so can consumers - and as the race to drive the real-time web continues, so does the race to control it.

In the end, I’m excited to see more developments of the real-time web, but this is a classic case of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” engineering.