UStream.TV, which for the uninitiated is best described as the YouTube of live streaming video, is quickly gaining a name for themselves as the home for live glitzy Hollywood events, engaged presidential candidates, and of course Chris Pirillo. UStream Thursday added the ability for broadcasters on the system to customize their profile pages by adding embedded widgets. I’ve been pondering how good of an idea this is. Certainly some widgets can be quite useful and to a large degree, the UStream userbase is of a technically savvy bent. That not withstanding, I have a sinking feeling that UStream profiles could end up looking like MySpace profiles.
In a blog post today on UStream’s website announcing the new feature, they linked to an instructional page showing how in three easy steps one could include a wide variety of widgets. As I write this, my machine has slowed to a crawl, because below the easy three step instructions on how to include embed codes into your page, there are 20 separate flash widgets loaded, all very interesting in their own right - just not all things I might include on a page where I also expect a chat program and streaming video to also run
I’ve spoken with founder Brad Hunstable on many an occasion, and think what he’s doing at UStream is ground-breaking stuff, but I have to wonder if perhaps some limits should be placed on this new feature. If it were me, I might limit widget placement to a maximum of two or three per page, or perhaps give broadcasters in the settings a finite choice.
Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong, and the broadcasters of UStream.TV won’t abuse their profiles (not to mention assault our eyes or CPUs MySpace-style).
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