Site: Footytube

by Matt on 02 March 2010

footytube.com View highlights and videos from football games around the world. It might be somewhat dubious but then it is free. #ep12

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Pros

Wayne Rooney

I’ve been using footytube for a few years as a reliable place to go find the latest football highlights. And whilst it used to just be a standard blog it has now grown into a mighty engine covering football from around the globe.

Cleverly, it calls itself a search engine and has a disclaimer to say that it doesn’t host any of the content (cos that would be illegal right?) but when you dress your video pages up to look like Youtube, the lines do get blurred somewhat. Yep there’s related videos; most watched; dumb user comments; rate-this-video; user channels etc etc.

Credit to them for creating some features of their own though. Some of which work better than others. The ones I like: exploded pie charts showing how users have rated the game from Awesome to Rubbish (haha) and the fact they pull in related forum posts and stories about that team. Tons of further journeys you can go on.

Cons

John Terry

So the features I’m not so sure about? Mostly it revolves around the clutter whacked on the page in the name of social media. The sign-in bit at the top (to be fair you can do a lot as just a Guest, which must have been key to their success) and the Facebook chat bar. Why do sites use this? It’s a notoriously shit IM even on Facebook itself.

Also the home and team pages feature strips of images along the top, which are certainly nice to add a bit of colour but they’re not really content as they don’t lead to videos. Potentially confusing to users as it’s titled ‘Today at Footytube’. The homepage is packed with tons of little modules and even full blog posts - possibly better off living somewhere else.

But don’t get me wrong, this site is a hugley impressive beast. Let’s just hope they continue to circumnavigate the copyright issues for a while longer.

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