Facebook's Video application = utter rubbish!
Facebook has a massive catalogue of applications to satisfy the desires of every single user. Whether it’s uploading photos, or playing Scrabble, Facebook will have an app for you; even video… It’s just a shame that the video app is so rubbish!
Since YouTube closed my account a little while ago (for no apparent reason), I have decided to upload my videos containing people to Facebook. It seemed to make sense, after all I can tag people on Facebook, and it brings everything together quite nicely; however, over the past few months I have struggled to get anything actually uploaded to the site.
I have tried several browsers and even two different operating systems to see if it is a problem at my end but I’ve concluded that the application is fundamentally flawed. What I don’t understand is why it can’t employ the same upload method as the photo application – which seems to work every time.
I have found that leaving the browser open and just walking away for a while seems to do the trick, but isn’t a guarantee of success! So, in order to upload anything you must have the patience of a saint, and a lot of time to potentially waste.
More and more people are using video cameras, for example on phones (particularly as the iPhone 4 now records in 720p HD), and you can bet they’ll want to upload their videos in the same way they already do with their photos; so why have the development team left this potentially brilliant application so painfully under-developed?
I understand that videos take up extra space, and of course Facebook is free, so giving away all this extra video capacity would lead to problems in the long-run, but surely they should be more transparent about it, or maybe adopt a freemium model where you can upload bigger, higher-quality videos for a price?
What are your experiences of the Facebook Video application? Comments welcome.
James