Just a few days ago Google announced that it would be halting uploads to Google video. Previously uploaded content will be maintained (for now) but new uploads will stop working soon.

Unfortunately that puts me in a bit of an awkward position. I’ve been using Google Video to host “unlisted” videos at the private “intranet” section of my Speech Team’s website.  I’m using Google Apps for education to host the site, and chose the Google Sites option because of the wiki-esque nature of the system.  Now I’m sort of stuck.  See, Google doesn’t let me embed much external content, even Google maps are too scary for Google Sites.  I’ve read that fixes are in the works, but I’m skeptical that Google is not letting me embed html and iframe content because of security issues,rather they want to control what content hosts you use.

Without Google Video’s semi-private functionality, I don’t know what I am going to use to embed video.  I and my kids do not want their practice pieces published online, the whole point is to see the bad things in it, make the fixes and compare versions of their speeches within the privacy of our team.

Wise up google, if you are not going to provide the same functionality in your new tools, at least open your system to allow us to embed content outside of your whitelist of “gadgets.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.