Saturday, October 7, 2006

Google Video Adds "Unlisted" Option

Haochi of the Googlified blog notes that Google Video now has an “unlisted” option for videos you upload. While the “learn more” link to Google’s help entry on this is broken at the moment, this looks like it’s similar to what Picasa Web Albums already offer; your video will appear on a non-password protected URL you can share with your friends, but the URL won’t appear in other search results.

As opposed to Picasa*, Google Video doesn’t make the error of combining this with an easy-to-guess URL – e.g. here’s a URL of a video** I just uploaded selecting the “unlisted” option (the URL contains a long number and the page itself has a “noindex” meta directive, too).

However, this is still not quite your private video hard disk – after all, I’m sure Google will still screen the content and check for copyrighted stuff or anything else that may be against their ToS. In that sense, even though the URL may be secret at first, it’s still public, and no one can stop you from linking to it publicly.

*Picasa Web Albums at the moment seems to be in a transitional phase where they update their URL structure to consider this loop hole.

**The video quality sucks compared to my original WMV file.

Google Video Adds "Unlist ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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