I am an heavy user of Google Docs, always on the look out on how I can boost my productivity with this cloud-based word/sheet editor. I have found some glitches between gmail and gdocs that sometimes make the Google experience incoherent. I noticed five minutes ago a new feature in the gdocs that will be very handy:
If you don't use Google Docs a lot, you might not know what I'm talking about. "Paste the item itself into the email". That's super convenient to directly send a text to someone when that was the initial intention, instead of sending the person a link to a document...
Ah, Youtube, so precious, always coming up with the least expected features you could hope for on a video platform. It's just in, now you can import contacts from your gmail account into your Youtube account (take that Gmail non-users). Great news.
So of course, since my business is about online video distribution, I rushed to my channel management page and started importing my contacts. I have 350 email addresses on my Gmail account alone. Youtube imported all of them. No discrimination criteria. I went from 6 contacts on Youtube to exactly 348.
Well I just had the worst time ever. Out of 340 contacts imported, I found no one that had an account with Youtube. In fact, I know that some of my contacts with a gmail address have an account on Youtube, but it seems that Youtube didn't find it.
Then, once you got 350 contacts, how do you easily manage them? Well, on Youtube, you don't. It's old school marketing, one by one. And they mix your gmail contacts with the ones you made on the video platform. So I had to erase 350 useless contacts, but sort through it to keep the few Youtube contacts.
Import contact on Youtube = waste of time.
Why did Youtube do that? Because it's "viral". Free customer acquisition. Free email database. Shameless marketing. I don't know who their customer acquisition director is, but he should work on being smarter, rather than replicating other services' dullness.
So maybe this feature doesn't work because it is in beta, well I don't care. I'm not being paid to test your service. It's free, ok, but I watch your ads, I even fill out your surveys (and pretend I remember the ads so that brands keep putting money in this free service). Still, don't waste my time like that!
However, I'm a Youtube junkie, which is why I react passionately when Youtube cheats me with a cool funny video that tells me I should try their stupid new feature:
