BlogSat

These are my favorite examples of unintended consequences that I happened to walk someone through last week. Years ago, in a coffee shop, I was listening to someone at the next table (yea, I know eavesdropping on phone conversations is bad, but people should be less loud :-P) confidently telling their friend/client, "Trust me. You need to make the YouTube videos longer - over 15 mins. That's what they prioritize. Just drag out the content."  I couldn't help grinning. I'd recently stopped working at YouTube then, and so while I knew that person was not exactly right, they were not completely wrong either.  It's conventional logic now among the creator community that you do better on YouTube if your videos are longer. It's why when you search for [Peppa Pig] on YouTube for you kids, the first few videos you get are either long-running livestreams or videos that are an hour long, and if you're listening to music you can often end up in a compilation video...

The Internets reminded me that today was exactly 2 years since Avenger's Endgame was released. I remember that day vividly for a few reasons I woke up before sunrise (way before the alarm went off).   I wore this (now that I think about it) borderline appropriate T-shir t and then..  .. showed up before 7:00am to watch that movie at Century Shoreline before going to work.  This is still the only movie that has a scene that can make me tear up consistently every single time (I know, I know - it's ridiculous).  That day was interesting from a work perspective for another reason. Along with a few other people at work (and with some crazy last-minute negotiating), we'd pulled together the Thanos Easter Egg on Search. It was typical of a lot of Easter Eggs on Search at the time, in that it wasn't really anybody's job, but we pushed it through because we loved the idea enough to do it. My day job on Media experience on Search helped me justify it a little bit I gue...