Released a bunch of cool new YouTube features including easy ability to share a video on Twitter and the return of the status bar during uploads. Accompanying this push was the return of release notes, or at least an expanded version of normal “here’s what’s new” that we post every so often.
Why am i blogging about our release notes? Well, because it’s part of something bigger that we’re attempting – to be more transparent. Since the acquisition, we’ve grown tremendously in size – both as a company and as a community. Although we’re obviously thrilled with the success, it has come with tradeoffs. Sometimes lose the connection to our community because we’ve got so much going on. We appear to be more “corporate” and blackbox.
How are we countering this? Well, we’ve gotten more interactive on our Twitter and Facebook accounts. Also we’re trying to increase the amount of information and data we share on the blog. We also intend to do more open betas where the community can participate in our development process at an early stage. I’m pushing for even more radical transparency — giving raw data about our upload latency, etc when available. There will always be information we can’t share – sometimes for competitive reasons, or when it would be considered financial guidance or even because it has legal or privacy implications. But generally we’re going to try and do a better job of putting roadmaps, ideas, successes and failures out there.
To people running their own companies, i’d put the same challenge forth – if there’s not a really good reason to keep it a secret, just share it.