I have to say I prefer YouTube over Google Video, although the audio tends to be out of sync with the video, it’s hard to locate the gems from all the crap, a lot of the comments are “if you liked that then check out this video” spams, and you can’t download the videos for offline viewing.

Here’s why I think YouTube rocks:

• It’s developed a large, active community of users who comment on videos, rate videos, become friends, create favorites and playlists, etc.
• The way you can embed videos into your blog or site (see example below) is really well done
• Videos can have tags associated with them
• It’s so easy to get sucked in to watch more videos once you’re in there, through Related Videos, Playlists, Director Videos, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Discussed, Top Favorites, Most Linked, Recently Featured, Most Recent and Random

I’m not alone in my opinion that YouTube has Google Video beat. The Church of the Customer blog offers up 10 reasons why YouTube is better than Google Video, which include the vastly superior user interface, the viral “pass it on” and “put on site” functions, superior playback performance, the display of the number of times each video has been played, the user accounts, better search functionality (e.g. the ability to sort search returns by date added, title, view count and rating), the way three random frames from each video are displayed next to search results, the display of trackbacks, and the related video functionality.

Here’s my favorite YouTube video to date. It’s a segment from a Japanese game show called “Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende” (Silent Library), where contestants suffer more and more outrageous tortures without being able to utter a sound:

My second favorite is the series of Star Trek action figure videos, including Crib, Karaoke and Poolside. You’ve got to check those out too.

Got any favorites to share?