Month: May 2008

Can YouTube Beat Facebook Video Quality?

I recently had an interesting experience with a video I posted both to our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel and to the official Mayo Clinic Facebook “fan” page. The video was created to provide a behind-the-scenes tour of the new Mayo Clinic Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla. I uploaded the same file to both YouTube and Facebook, and the quality difference is striking.

Here’s the YouTube version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UT6vmldLRw]

It looks fine, but my friend Hoyt, the star of the video, was struck by the superior clarity of the same video on the Mayo Clinic Facebook page. I had noticed this previously with some other videos I had uploaded.

Obviously YouTube has the volume and critical mass for video sharing (and the advantage that you can embed it within blogs, while with Facebook you can only offer a link), but I wonder why YouTube’s quality is so much lower.

Is it because of the sheer volume of videos, that because YouTube is processing so many new uploads every day so it can’t afford to devote the processing power that would render the videos more clearly in Flash? Does the fact that Facebook has a video application for its platform contribute to the quality difference? Or are there some settings that would make YouTube videos look better? The one I uploaded was 137 megs for about a 6-minute video in mpeg format.

What settings would you recommend for export to get maximum quality in videos uploaded to YouTube, while keeping file sizes reasonable?

And do you have to be a fan of Mayo Clinic to see the Facebook version? I’m assuming you have to be at least a Facebook member, although you can at least see the basic fan page without being a member.

What do you think? What’s your experience with maximizing video quality in YouTube? Can it be as good as what you see in Facebook?

Updated: I tried clicking the video link without being logged in to Facebook, and I could see the video, so it seems it isn’t necessary to be a Facebook member to see Facebook video.

Mayo Clinic Social Media Progress Report

After presenting at a Web 2.0 Summit last week in Oakland, CA, I got to thinking it would be good to do an update on where we are with Mayo Clinic‘s engagement in social media. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last three years from a completely “old media” focus to a more balanced approach, continually increasing our attention to what Charlene Li calls “the Groundswell.” And hopefully when I do another update in a few months, I’ll be able to look back on many more exciting developments.

Here’s a list of where we are as of today in our social media exploration and adoption. For those areas in which I can pinpoint a starting date, I’ll do so.

Care Pages – Mayo Clinic provides this service for hospitalized patients, enabling them to provide updates to family and friends on a secure Web page. This helps keep loved ones informed without the undue burden of repeating information by cell phone for each individual, and it enables concerned friends and family to send greetings to the patient. We’ve had this service for a few years, and I know many patients appreciate how it makes staying in touch while hospitalized easier.

Podcasts – Mayo Clinic’s first podcast was based on our Medical Edge radio program, and launched in Sept. 2005 through what was then the iTunes Music Store. This gave us our first taste of the potential interest in and power of “new media.” In January 2007 we began offering video podcasts of Mayo Clinic Medical Edge television segments, and in July 2007 followed with extended podcasts in several categories: Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Children’s Health, Heart, Cancer and Bones & Muscles. In April 2008, we moved these podcasts to podcasts.mayoclinic.org, so users could find and listen to individual segments of interest, instead of subscribing to a particular feed.

RSS/Web Feeds – Also in Sept. 2005, we began offering really simple syndication (RSS), a.k.a. Web Feeds. You can sign up for Mayo Clinic News from all three campuses (or can choose to receive only Arizona, Florida or Minnesota news), health information news, science news or business-related news.

Syndicated Video – Mayo Clinic began using Voxant in 2007 to make its Medical Edge video segments available for syndication to other Web sites. Instead of making people go to our mayoclinic.org site to view the videos, we wanted to put them where people are going, such as in on-line news sites. The Mayo Clinic YouTube channel was started just last week; expect to see the look improve significantly yet this month. Here’s our latest addition, a video tour of the new Mayo Clinic Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UT6vmldLRw]

Facebook – with Mayo Medical School and several other health-related science schools (and with our mayo.edu e-mail addresses), Mayo has had people in Facebook for a long time. In the last six months we’ve seen the number of Mayo participants in Facebook more than double, to over 2,100. When “fan” pages became available to organizations and brands in November 2007, we established one immediately (partly because of what you see when you go to myspace.com/mayoclinic.) We revised and re-categorized the official Mayo Clinic Facebook page in January 2008, and have 1,053 fans as of this writing. In another effort to prevent domain name “squatting,” we also have established accounts in Twitter (twitter.com/mayoclinic) and Flickr.

Finally, we’ve begun sponsoring some official blogs. The first was in conjunction with an event, a symposium on innovation in health care in November 2007. It was hosted on wordpress.com and customized somewhat, but we didn’t map to a mayoclinic.org subdomain. We followed that in March 2008 with our Health Policy blog, our podcast blog and a blog about diversity in education at Mayo. These have all started in the last two months, and we hope and expect to continue developing new blogs.

Meanwhile, our colleagues at our sister site, MayoClinic.com, which is Mayo Clinic’s consumer health information site, have been starting blogs and a podcast, too. The blogs cover topics like Alzheimers’ Disease, Nutrition, Stress, Pregnancy and Depression.

Mayo Clinic is one of the United States’ best places to work (Fortune magazine has had us in its top 100 for the last five years.) I feel exceptionally blessed to be able to work for an organization like Mayo, working with such interesting subject matter during this exciting time of innovation and change in the media world.

Fast Flip Video Uploads

Here’s a video I took this evening while dining with my bride at her favorite local Chinese buffet restaurant, in celebration of the anniversary of her birth:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX23tLwjYoo]

I uploaded it directly from the Flip video camera to YouTube. It isn’t particularly long, but within 10 minutes of upload it was processed and ready for viewing.

This is just to illustrate how quick and easy it is to upload video to the web using the Flip. Instead of having to digitize from a tape, which takes at least the length of time required to connect the camera to your computer and play the tape segment, the file can be almost instantly uploaded. And if you don’t want to edit, you can just upload the raw video.

Not that you generally should. It’s really easy to edit the video files, so you can trim extraneous seconds to improve the presentation. But if you catch some extraordinary event, you can show it to the world within a few minutes.

I’ll be doing some exploration of the balance between time to worldwide video availability and quality of the product. Let’s just say that what you see above minimizes both, and that I spent twice as long writing this blog post as YouTube and I together spent producing and processing the video.

Why Facebook Won’t Be Friendster

This weekend I got another firsthand view of why, despite suggestions that today’s kids will chase after whatever is the next new shiny toy, Facebook will have long-term staying power.

I witnessed scores of young ladies (the young men were much less active in this) taking pictures of each other and their dates at the Austin, Minn. High School Prom. Then two of them who are really close to me came home the next evening and started uploading dozens photos to Facebook, and tagging all of their friends.

So, for example, here is a pre-prom picture that showed up in my news feed, after Bekah tagged me:

And here’s a partial group picture from one of the early Saturday evening events:

Some observers warn that Facebook will become uncool because people like me (or at least in my age group) can be members. Others say the concern is that with Facebook being a “walled garden” in which your data goes in but doesn’t come out, users will rebel because they want data portability.

I don’t buy either of those arguments. Facebook’s variable privacy settings (as described in Facebook 210) mean people of all ages can coexist in the same social networking space, just as we all formerly used the same land-line phone network and now use interoperable digital cell phones with text messaging.

Just because we have the technical ability to interact through cell phones doesn’t mean I’m regularly “texting” people of my daughters’ generation. But it doesn’t stop us from peacefully coexisting in the same digital spectrum. And if I needed to reach one of them in an emergency, being able to send a message through Facebook may be just the ticket.

Likewise, I only know one of their peers who’s using Twitter. This tool of the geeky set has a lot of potential, but hasn’t broken through to mass appeal in anything like the numbers that Facebook has, partly because a lot of people look at it and can’t immediately see what good it will do them. But if they ever discover Twitter, they won’t let the fact that Robert Scoble and I are using it keep them from taking advantage of its wonderfulness.

They don’t have a problem figuring Facebook’s functionality, though, which is why it’s the top photo-sharing site on the Internet. It’s just simple to use, and over their high school and college years they will load lots of memories to these servers.

Unlike the data portability purists, who want the ability to integrate data from all sorts of yet-to-be-invented services into whatever container site they desire, my daughters and their friends just want to be able to connect with each other easily. And they LOVE Facebook Chat. Data portability means nothing to them. Functionality does. They want to be where their friends are, and they don’t particularly care about the identity of Facebook’s other 70 million active users.

As long as Facebook keeps developing and improving its service and doesn’t violate their trust in a way that creeps them out, the likelihood that many of its younger users will bail for another network is remote. And as they see how friend lists can make it reasonably easy to separate personal and professional networks in one site, they’ll be less inclined to join a network like LinkedIn.

I still think LinkedIn is likely to do well in the long term, because it has a critical mass in business networking. But with 14 million photos uploaded to Facebook daily, I see its critical mass continuing to grow as well. People aren’t going to lightly leave a few hundred friends and their photos behind.

What do you think? The growth in Facebook’s reported number of active users seems to be slowing somewhat, but do you see anything on the horizon that would cause it to decline? Any possibility of a recession (two quarters of negative growth) for Facebook?

Blogging 131: How NOT to Shoot Web Video

The Flip video camera, which I reviewed and demonstrated in Blogging 130, enables you to easily shoot and quickly edit video to be uploaded to YouTube and embedded on a blog.

But as my friend Jane likes to say, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

Or, at least you should get training and follow some basic principles so you can produce better-looking content.

Here’s an example of the wrong way to shoot web video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnwR_h2Sd1E]

The main problem (aside from needing a better spokesmodel), is the brightly lit window behind me at the Seattle airport. It makes me all shadowy. Even so, you can still distinguish some of my features and it’s not completely intolerable (although you can weigh in on that in the comments), but it’s definitely not high quality shooting.

Here’s a better example, which comes from just turning the camera the other way:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmMeMJDWYHk]

The subject matter isn’t any better looking, but at least you get a more accurate map of the creases created by four-and-a-half decades of smiling and laughing (and squinting in the sun).

I’m also temporarily password-protecting this post, and making the videos on YouTube only visible to me, to see how that works. I’ll remove the password protection later.

Updated: Here’s what I learned. By setting the videos as “Private” in YouTube, that overrides the other setting I had done to allow embedding within this blog post. So if you have video you only want to share through a password-protected post, you can’t use YouTube embedding to display it. It has to be public on YouTube to be embedded in a post. I’ve now removed both the password protection on this post and the privacy on the YouTube videos so you can learn from these stellar examples.