Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Flock Fixed YouTube

My one longtime reader may remember a few days ago I started to be vexed by a problem with YouTube. I'd uploaded a video, which, when it finished processing and I tried to play the video I was told "We're sorry, this video is no longer available."

I Googled "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" and learned that this particular problem is epidemic, starting some time around June of 2008.

I found some people have quite a conspiratorial explanation as to what is causing the problem, speculating that some YouTube tech people were disgruntled when YouTube was absorbed into the Google empire. So, they began sabotaging YouTube.

Maybe that type explanation would explain why Feedburner has problems. Google also absorbed Feedburner. Feedburner has not been able to get the Google ads working, either within the Feedburner account via using the "monetize" tab, or after Feedburner passed off the monetizing thing to Google, with a message saying you can now control your AdSense Feedburner ads within your Adsense account. The ads do appear in Google's Newsreader, but Feedburner just displays a blank space. But you can see the ad code if you look at the HTML.

Very annoying.

Anyway, various people found various solutions to the YouTube problem. Delete your temporary Internet files, flush your DNS, use Firefox or Google Chrome, disable Google Web Accelerator. None of these fixed my YouTube problem.

Then I read several people saying something called Flock, that being a Web 2.0 browser, fixed the problem. I thought, I'd been down the try a different browser route twice already.

But, I downloaded and installed Flock anyway. And it fixed the problem. I have not seen the sorry "We're sorry" message since.

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