Posted: April 4, 2010
Recently, I had noticed that the star rating system had kind of disappeared from Youtube. By kind of, it is still there in some places but it doesn’t seem like you can give videos a rating anymore. What happened?
Back in September 2009, Youtube posted on their blog an article about Five Stars Dominate Ratings. It seems as though people either like the videos, in which case they give the video 5 stars, or they don’t like the video and give it 1 star. So how about a system that offers only two choices, Like or Dislike? It appears that this is exactly what Youtube is implementing and following in the footsteps of other popular social media website’s functionality, such as Facebook.
This got me looking into Vimeo, another online video sharing website, that has already implemented a Like feature and has gone as far as including the functionality into embedded videos. If you embed a Vimeo video on your website, once the video has finished playing, an icon appears in the top right that you can click and ‘Like’ the video. Of course, you have to have a Vimeo user account and login to do this but this system allows for a user-friendly way for site visitors to offer feedback on videos you embed into your website.
Youtube is on the right track with their form of Like / Dislike (Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down) functionality, although they have yet to extend the functionality to be included in embedded videos. I suspect it is only a matter of time before they do.
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