Happy New Year everyone! We hope you all had a great time last night and (if needed) a smooth recovery today as we usher in 2013.
Just a quick heads up, Vermont Design Works will be closed today, New Years day, January 1, 2013 but we’ll be back in the office tomorrow morning at 9 AM. In the meantime you can call and leave a message at 802-383-7679 or fill out our contact form if you’d like to inquire about our web development or marking services.
For now, why not kill some time watching cats sing Auld Lang Syne (aka the New Year’s Song). Wait, in 2013 the internet is still going to be primarily used to feature funny cat videos, right?
By the way, if you aren’t fully aware of what an important role cats play in modern life, I suggest you check out this mini-documentary on Catvertising before 2013 leaves you behind
If you’re especially hungover and the only cure is more internet video, here’s YouTube’s “Rewind of YouTube Style 2012″:
Quite honestly I think YT needs to leave it to their users because some of that was pretty awful… For example, Youtube user failarmy put together this amazing mash-up called The Ultimate Girls Fail Compilation 2012 (language warning):
Sorry ladies, that was the first “2012″ video to come to mind because it’s been very heavily promoted or otherwise featured for over a month… But to be fair, here’s their non-gender specific fail compilation they posted just 3 days ago (language warning):
(And if you have an issue with the preview images for those last 2 videos, I’m sorry but I didn’t pick them… The geniuses at failarmy who obviously understand how to boost click-through rates did!)
Summary:Did you know it’s possible to post your YouTube videos directly to your Facebook profile and your Twitter account? Today we’ll show you how to adjust settings inside of your YouTube account so that new uploads, comments, and more are automatically posted to your social media accounts. Skip to the end for short setup instructions.
Earlier this month I gave you a basic lesson in uploading videos to YouTube from an iPhone. That post arose out of my own need to upload a video from my iPhone 4S and not immediately seeing an obvious way to do so. In addition to the great learning experience when it comes to uploading new videos, it also lead me to discover YouTube’s social media integration features. I can’t say I hadn’t seen these settings before, but we don’t post a lot of videos so it’s not been a concern. That said, at some point in recent years I must have been niggling around our Vermont Design Works YouTube account and linked it to our Twitter account… But I only realized it after I uploaded that VDW puppy video from my iPhone and, to my surprise, immediately saw it pop up on our Twitter page.
As I explained a couple of weeks ago, there are a variety of different ways to link social media accounts to each other, so when I saw the video auto-post to Twitter, seemingly on its own, I immediately freaked out – how did this happen? I didn’t think I had anything set to do this and random actions from my phone being auto-tweeted would obviously be cause for concern! After the initial shock I began to dig around and think more rationally and it quickly became apparent that this had to have come from YouTube directly (not from my phone, not from Facebook, not from some third-party app). Again, keep in mind that it must have been months (if not years) ago when I linked our YouTube account to Twitter.
So YouTube was pushing newly uploaded videos to Twitter, I had figured that much out, but I didn’t know how and didn’t see any related settings right away because I was looking for things like “Social Media Options”. Do you see anything like that here?
So I took the lazy man’s way out and simultaneously Googled and Tweeted a question, hoping the Big G or one of our Tweeps could tell me where to edit these settings. Christal Collette got back to me with the answer Google search results could point me in the right direction, and she even included a direct link to the page where I could edit my settings: “Sharing” (link will work if you’re logged into your account). In hindsight “Sharing” makes sense, but what does one normally think about when they hear “Sharing”, as it relates to YouTube? For me, and I suspect most people, you think of the”Sharing” link below each video, which allows you to copy and paste a link to the video, email a link or grab code to embed the video elsewhere. I’m sure you’re familiar, but just in case, it looks like this:
When I see the word “Sharing” on YouTube, that’s is what I think of. It’s not surprising then that when I see “Sharing” in my settings, this is where I assume I would edit these options (dictate whether or not people can embed my videos, etc.) So while I don’t think “Sharing” settings is the worst place to hide autoposting social media features, I think there’s a bit of a usability issue here given that “Sharing” is used differently on the front-end user side of things. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like they’re creating unnecessary potential confusion.
Getting back to the point, Cristal was right – the “Sharing Settings” section is exactly where I needed to go. Take a look:
And connecting accounts is incredibly easy. Let’s first set Orkut aside given that it’s doubtful you or anyone you know uses it, unless you’re in Brazil, India or Japan. We’ll also leave Facebook alone for now too, because as far as I can tell, you can only set it up YouTube integration for a personal profile – not a “page”, which doesn’t help you if you’re trying to manage your business’s social media accounts. For now let’s just take a look at Twitter integration. When you click the “Connect” button, you’re immediately prompted for your login credentials in a pop-up window:
Enter your info and you’re done. Your sharing settings will now look something like this:
So what’s with all of the check-boxes at the bottom? Well basically this is a list of options of things you can choose to share. The “On YouTube” column of check boxes allows you to decide what will be shown to YouTube users on your YouTube channel, whereas the “On connected accounts” check boxes allow you to select which actions will be posted to Twitter, Facebook and Orkut (obviously depending on which ones you’ve enabled). So in this example, I’ve my YouTube settings show that I will automatically tweet whenever I comment on or like a video, but not when I add a video to a playlist or when I upload a new one. (“Upload a video*” was the option I had previously checked, which is why my puppy video upload was automatically pushed to Twitter, which again brought me on this whole journey.)
Basically YouTube pushes a link to the video and the title out as a tweet, prepended with “I liked a @YouTube video”. Obviously this language is modified a bit if the YouTube action you took was uploading a new video or commenting on a video, etc. but you get the picture.
Short YouTube to Twitter Instructions
Log in to your account
From the YouTube home page, click the drop-down next to your username in the upper right and select “Settings”
Choose “Sharing” from the “Account Settings” section in the left-hand column
Click the “Connect” button next to any social media service you have an account with and you would like to connect your YouTube account to
Follow basic instructions (usually just entering login credentials)
If you’d like any of your YouTube activity to be posted to your Twitter account, follow these instructions and let me know how you make out. Any other tips on autoposting YouTube videos to social media? Questions on linking up other social media accounts? Post your questions and messages in the comments section below. And of course if you’d like to discuss your online marketing, social media and content strategy, please feel free to contact us today!
Summary: Uploading videos from your iPhone couldn’t be easier… once you know how to do it. If you’re like me, your first instinct was to try to upload via the YouTube app, only to discover this isn’t possible. It seems that Apple has tried so hard to make the process dummy-proof they ignore what many of us would view as the more intuitive way to make this process happen. At any rate, once you’ve read this post I guarantee that you’ll be a YouTubing machine. Skip to the end if you’re looking for the short version.
Let me just start out this post by saying I’m aware that I haven’t discovered something new here. But given that it took me a little digging to figure out how to post a video directly from my iPhone 4S yesterday, I figured I can’t be the only one who struggled with this on my first attempt. With that in mind, I thought I should add another walk through to the growing list already in Google, which I unfortunately only discovered after figuring it out on my own. (I tend to learn by trial and error because it seems to stick better).
Anyway, when I came back from lunch the other day I walked in on two of our office’s puppies meeting/playing for the first time and knew I needed to share the event with the world…. Unfortunately, as you can see in the image below, it’s tough to get a good still shot of two fast moving and rambunctious pups (especially in this lighting):
Even if I had gotten a clear shot, how was I going to convey the fun these dogs were having in a photo? This was begging to be captured in video. So I went ahead and quickly recorded a 12 second clip to post to YouTube and social media before realizing I’d never uploaded to YouTube from my phone. Still, I figured it couldn’t be that difficult – I’d just log into our account through my YouTube app and surely there will be an “Upload” option, just like there is when you log in on a computer. Right? Wrong. It seems like the iPhone YouTube app (at least in iOS 6) is built for front end user interaction only (watching, commenting, etc.), at least as far as I can tell. I knew there still had to be a way and I was determined to figure it out, but to be safe I put together my Plan B – I decided I would email it to myself so that I could post from my computer later if I couldn’t figure it out on my phone.
After thinking about my data transfer limits on my Verizon Wireless plan I decided to cancel my email and log in to our WiFi network on my phone before sending. I’ve never gone over my data usage allowance, but I like to exercise caution rather than get hit with an unexpectedly and unnecessarily high bill. So I started sending the email, cancelled, got on our WiFi and then began again – I located and selected the video in my camera roll, clicked the familiar “share” button in the bottom left-corner and sent the message:
The email went through quickly without issue and I received it on my desktop computer in the office within minutes… but it was the detour of getting on the VDW WiFi network that actually indirectly led me to the YouTube upload option. As I said, I cancelled my original message to get on WiFi and then resent. But it was when I was prepping the message the second time that I noticed there were fewer “sharing” options than I’m used to seeing when I share a photo. I share photos much more frequently so these are the 9 options I usually see:
But when you share a video, these 3 are the only sharing options that pop up:
There are only 3 options, but as you can see, the third one is YouTube. I’m sure you can also see how it’s easy to overlook given that “YouTube” is never a sharing option when you share photos and my intention of “sharing” through the share button in this case was to email from the outset (after not finding another way when specifically looking), so I hadn’t even reviewed these “share” options. I was just in a hurry to email the video clip and get back to figuring out how to post directly from my phone in hopes that I wouldn’t even have to resort to Plan B. I hadn’t even considered this as an area that might allow me to post directly to YouTube. I thought certainly you’d have to go through a “YouTube App” of some sort. Besides, 99% of the sharing I do is through email or text messages, unless I’m sharing on FB and Twitter, but in those cases I do so directly through those apps.
Anyway, I hadn’t been paying close attention, but when I was sending the email, I had sort of noticed that the sharing options screen looked different somehow, I just hadn’t bothered to explore in what way. Curiosity got me after sending the email so I went back to check out the options and there it was, right where the makers of an intelligent smartphone (redundancy?) would put it for ease of use. But it’s important to know that you’ll still need an account, which I would recommend setting up using your computer first, especially if you’d like a YouTube account without being forced into a Gmail account
Side Note: The YouTube “sharing” icon is the same as the default YouTube app icon for the app that used to come preinstalled with earlier versions of iOS. As you may or may not know, with the release of iOS 6, Apple stopped including YouTube forcing you to go to the App Store if you wanted it. The icon is also now different, but for some reason the blast from the past YouTube “share” icon offers a bit of iOS 5 nostalgia.
How to Upload Videos to YouTube from iPhone
So go get yourself a YT account now if you don’t already have one and then I’ll resume today’s lesson…
Go on, we’ll wait….
… You good? Great, welcome back! Now let’s get this show on the road.
So, go back to your camera roll and select the video you want to upload to YouTube, click the share button in the bottom left and then the YouTube icon in the bottom right. Now your iPhone will prompt you to enter your YouTube account login credentials:
If you can’t get past that screen I think it’s time we had a conversation about creating secure yet memorable passwords, but that’s a topic for another day… Next YouTube prompts you for some basic info about your video. You’ll have to scroll to complete it, but it’s really only a handful of fields to complete, and few (if any) are even mandatory:
Click publish and watch a progress bar fill up until your video completely uploads. And that’s all there is to it. Well, almost…. There’s still a bit of a lag before the video is live and accessible on the web, but it’s only a matter of minutes. I’ll hand the mic over to Dave Taylor for a few words on that, as his iPhone/YouTube upload tutorial from 2010 covers the lag specifically. With comments starting in March of 2010, Dave was obviously using a much older iPhone (3G) and iOS (iOS 3.x), but the entire process for uploading videos to YouTube is largely unchanged.
By the way, if you’ve got a lot of pictures and videos in your camera roll, to the point it’s difficult to find the video you’re trying to upload, try the little trick I just found in this forum message. Awesome!
Anyway, whether in early 2010 or late 2012, the truncated version of iPhone to YouTube upload is as follows:
Create a YouTube account (preferably on your computer)
Select your video from your iPhone’s Camera Roll, click the share button in the bottom left corner, then the YouTube icon in the bottom right
Enter your YouTube login information
Enter your video details
Upload and wait a few minutes for your video to become available!
BTW, if you’re curious about how long this went on, I’d say virtually uninterrupted for about 4 hours. One might get distracted by their owner for a moment and the other one would pass out, but neither got a break for more than 5 minutes.
Anyway, I hope this unnecessarily detailed how-to video has helped you figure out how to upload your iPhone videos to YouTube. Later this month I’ll be writing a post about how you can automatically post new YouTube videos directly to your social media accounts as well. In fact that that’s the post I set out to write today before realizing that I’m probably not the only one who didn’t know how to post to YouTube in the first place.
Summary: Since Google acquired YouTube in 2006, they’ve increasingly found ways to attempt to coerce you into creating a Google account to use the video service. More recently it seemed like you no longer had a choice at all (no opt out offered), and that will almost certainly be the case soon, but some clever people have found a “trick” that seems to work for now. But you should know the other workarounds for when Google kills the “trick”.
In recent weeks I’ve had the pleasure of creating YouTube accounts and channels for a couple of our existing clients. In certain cases these new YT channels will be used to promote one of a company’s many key brands, while in other cases they are a company’s master account. Anyway, I say it was a pleasure only because I’m glad to see clients making this request because it indicates they are beginning to understand the importance of social media as a part of internet marketing, particularly the online video component. I’m really glad to see attitudes changing as people soften their resistance to new (and necessary) strategies. But that’s where the “pleasure” ends. The process can actually be really confusing and awful, so I’m writing this post to help you wade through it all.
YouTube Account Creation History
Back before Google bought YouTube in 2006, and for some time after, you didn’t need a Google account to comment, create YT channels, etc. You did need a YouTube account, but that seemed logical. After the takeover you could log in to YouTube using any existing YT or Google account (Gmail, etc.). They later added the Google account requirement which seemed logical (it is their service after all), but more recently the process has become a little more intrusive in a way that many users many not even realize.
The initial requirement of a Google account wasn’t a big deal, but when you create the account now you are ALSO being forced to create a Google+ account and a Google public profile. There is no opt out. And during the process it doesn’t make it very clear that these other non-optional parts of your account are being created. There is a way to remove them from your Google account after the fact, but the issue again is that I doubt most users will be aware these steps need to be taken.
Google/YouTube Account Workaround
Before I explain how you can create a YouTube account and remove all of the unwanted Google account extras, I should note that there is still currently a little known workaround that you’d never run across unless you were actively looking for it. This video shows you how it’s done, but it basically boils down to signing up for a Google account here and then going to YouTube.com and using that account to sign in. It’s a relatively simple process, but doesn’t offer a huge time savings over the method I’m about to describe in detail and given that Google doesn’t advertise this option, I expect that they’ll soon remove it all together (like they’ve done in other areas recently.)
Creating a YouTube Account
When you hit the normal YouTube sign-up screen, Google isn’t making any secret of the fact that you will have access to all of their other services, but it’s not clear that they are essentially setting you up to use those services without any additional action required on your part. Even the optional Google+ check box at the bottom basically just relates to personalized internet experience on non-Google sites. I suspect the average user might think that unchecking this box would prevent Google from creating a Google+ account, but I assure you it does not.
As I said earlier, there are no opt-out options, so you’ll need to complete the sign-up process before we can work on deleting your Google+ account, public profile, etc. To get started, log in to your new account and go to google.com. You should see your user name in the upper right. Click on your name and then click on the “Account” link from the drop-down. That will take you to this page:
Here you’ll need to click “Delete profile and remove associated Google+ features”, which will take you to a screen where you’ll have 2 deletion options:
Delete Google+ content
Delete your entire Google profile
The screenshots above show details of what each option will delete. Given that the second option makes mention of deleting YouTube data and that you originally set out to create a YouTube account, it might seem like you’d want to go with the first option. That’s what I thought initially as well. In reality, that only deletes your “Google+ Account” but still leaves you with a Google public profile.
Deleting your profile then becomes an added step. Start by clicking the “Edit profile” button, which will take you to a page that looks something like this:
Scroll all the way to the bottom and click “Delete profile”:
This brings up the scary, “point of no return” message. See the caveat though: “Please note that deleting your public profile will not affect the status of your Google Account.” That’s the key part that tells you that you’re just deleting the public profile that would have otherwise been out there for all the world to see. Clicking “Yes, delete my profile” won’t interfere with your ability to use YouTube.
Once you’ve completed the process and returned to your account info page, you’ll see that the “Delete profile and remove associated Google+ features” language has been replaced by “Close entire account and delete all services and info associated with it”. This verifies that you’ve already deleted the profile and G+ features.
As I said earlier though, you don’t actually have to delete your Google+ account and your public profile separately. The mention of losing YouTube data when you select the “Delete your entire Google profile” option is a little misleading because the loss relates strictly to Google+, according to the section heading “Data associated with YouTube channels that use a Google+ identity will be removed.” There’s even a link I missed the first time I viewed this page that tells you whether or not your YouTube account will be affected. So choosing this option is actually the way to go because it deletes the G+ account and the public profile all at once, without the drawn out process described above. Instead you just get this screen:
If you’re reading this blog post, I’m guessing it’s because you saw that you were being forced to create a Gmail account when signing up for YouTube. As you now know, that was just one part of the intrusion. Obviously privacy is an increasing concern as personal information continues to get spread around the web, so it’s important to know how to reel it back in when it gets out (like in the case of a Google public profile).
If you have any other issues with Google accounts, or if you’ve come up with additional workarounds yourself, please let us know in the comments below.
I’m sure we can all agree that it’s annoying to walk down the sidewalk behind someone who is trying to text while walking, even though most of us probably do it ourselves… but I ran across a clip yesterday that should give us all pause the next time we think about engaging in this obnoxious activity. While I love my iPhone’s “speech to text” feature, I’ve generally only used it when I’m alone for fear of looking like a escaped mental patient when using it in public, but I’d rather people think there’s something wrong with me than, well…
Yesterday, in my innocence, I would have said that while other people walk-texting is annoying, it’s something I can accept that we all do… but the world has changed my friends. If there’s any chance I can walk in to a bear in my driveway while texting, I think I’m done looking at my phone while walking except when necessary…. like checking Facebook.
By now you’ve heard all of the hype over the Google’s Project Glass, but even that promo video we all saw was called “Project Glass: One day…” because it’s not anywhere even close to being ready yet. Microsoft saw the opportunity to capitalize on the hype and is rushing the release of their new Windows Glasses. Check out the amazing promo below:
Congratulations Microsoft, you’ve done it again! You managed to produce another product with the same reliability, security and smooth operation as all past Windows products.
Seriously though, check out the Google Project Glass promo video below if somehow you missed it. We certainly still have a wait ahead of us before this is a reality, but it’s the type of thing I can imagine happening in the next few years, rather than something that is decades out. We are after all finally in the age of the flying car.
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