YouTube and Flickr

Flickr truly pushed the syndication envelope by encouraging people to "Blog this."  Before that, it was always seen as a bit rude to use someone else's bandwidth for your own blog/website.  I remember when I used to copy every picture to my server and then provide a link back.

One area that Flickr backed up their promise to host images, was to make the image hosting static and keep them up even when Flickr was "getting a massage".  This was huge!  The site could be down for various reasons, but the syndicated images would still show up around the web.  Great product management!!!

YouTube has been down most of the day, and unfortunately that means all of their syndicated content as well.  So they encourage syndication, but have been down most of the day...really brings down the audience experience.  As most of their flv's are hosted on limelight, I am a bit confused as to why this has to happen.  From what we discovered by poking around they have  a couple of things going on:

• flv's are hosted on Limelight's edge servers.
• mod rewrite embeds an swf that is rewritten to a single file with the correct flv as a parameter.
• The player either recognizes the domain or a separate player is used, as the player on the youtube.com domain provides additional functionality to find new videos.

So...unfortunately, their architecture does not allow for the static serving of the flv's if the site is down for maintenance.  Regardless of the status of YouTube.com, with the flv's on the edge servers, those should always be available.  It wouldn't take much more to move the player itself to somewhere else to allow for static serving while the main site is being worked on.

Bravo, Flickr for building this in ahead of time...