How To Always Get Higher Quality Videos From YouTube
Now that YouTube is offering videos in different qualities and choosing for you automatically the best one for your connection, you may feel like you are missing out and not getting the best version every time. Turns out there’s a new preference option under Account > Video Playback Quality that lets you tell YouTube to always play higher quality videos, never do it, or keep deciding what’s best for you. Use this new power with great care, young one.
Google Sky Makes It Into Google Maps
Google Sky, a pretty cool but almost forgotten feature in Google Earth, where users could see the constellations and multiple star layers in Earth, is now available in your web browser. Just head to sky.google.com and you’ll get a tricked out version of Google Maps with much of the features of Sky in Google Earth, though I just can’t figure out if the cool time slider is there. While this pales in comparison to Microsoft’s in-development WorldWide Telescope project, it’s light and easy and available now, so check it out.
Google Book Search Gets API Google has released an API for Google Book Search, letting application developers query Book Search and return if a book is available in Book Search and if it has a scanned copy. Using this, some interesting mashups can be created, like a site that shows you if a book is available in your library, available to read online at Google, or showing you how to purchase it at Amazon.
MapQuest Offers Unlimited API
While MapQuest, purely on name and longevity alone, is still in some areas the number one mapping site on the net, it is certainly losing the battle among power users and critics to newer services like Google Maps and the like. One way MapQuest could distinguish itself and show off the abilities of recent upgrades would be to get mashup developers to start using its API, and a recent announcement may help. MapQuest is now letting API developers have unlimited free use of the API.
While Google and its ilk limit use of their API to certain number of views or users per day, MapQuest’s API is both without limits and without costs, making it in some ways the only option now available for super-popular mashups. MapQuest’s API comes with many popular or unique features, including aerial/hybrid views, smooth zoom transitions, a Google Earth-like Globe View, speed and friction settings (possibly perfect for iPhone flicking), and advanced shape overlays. If, in order to avoid API key errors, enough mashups make the switch, users could start noticing that MapQuest is getting a lot better these days.
Googler is Convicted Hacker Valleywag has an article about Christophe Bisciglia, a senior software engineer at Google who is also a convicted former hacker. Bisciglia got in a dispute with his boss about a decade ago at the age of 17, and decided to take revenge by flooding the system with emails, sending email to the company’s customers, and defacing their website. Obviously he’s matured since then, but lets hope the next time he loses his temper the results don’t show in your Gmail account.
Spring Google Doodle
Google ran this Doodle logo to mark the beginning of Spring:
Google Loses FCC Auction The final results in the FCC’s spectrum auction are in, and the winners of major blocks of the 700 MHz spectrum are Verizon, winner of most of the coveted and somewhat open C block with Vodaphone (along with parts of A and B block), and AT&T, winner of most of B block. In total, the auction raised over $19 billion, much more than was expected, none of it from Google.
Hulu Launches
NBC and News Corp finally launchedHulu.com, its YouTube competitor video site, to the general public last week. Early reports are that, despite a lot of criticism from the press a year ago, the site has developed into a strong, high quality platform with a decent amount of good content. Hulu has a bunch of TV shows and full-length movies, and doesn’t charge anything to show them, just inserting ads. As long as the content is there, there’s absolutely no reason Hulu won’t be a hit.
Google Completes Purchase of DoubleClick
With the European regulators finally signing off on the deal, Google completed its megabillion dollar deal to buy DoubleClick. The acquisition met with a lot of opposition from Google’s competitors, who complained that it would create a monopoly in online advertising, but both U.S. and EU officials determined that DoubleClick’s business was sufficiently different enough from Google’s core search ad business, plus a possible Yahoo/Microsoft combo would be competitive enough.
The final acquisition cost was $3.24 billion, according to Google, about $140 million than originally planned. That’s either due to inflation, unexpected costs, slight changes in the deal, or includes the cost of getting the acquisition improved in the first place. SEJournal has the text of an email Google sent to all of DoubleClick’s clients with some FAQs.
Yahoo Buzz Driving Massive Traffic
I completely recant my earlier criticism of Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg competitor. The main difference between Buzz and Digg is that it only allows in publishers who use a Yahoo advertising program, and the top stories from Buzz make their way onto the Yahoo homepage, the most popular webpage on the planet. Publishers in the program are reporting all-time traffic records, even really popular sites like Salon and TechCrunch, making Buzz a huge incentive for publishers to use Yahoo for their ads. Yahoo should have thought of this years ago.
YouTube Integrated Into Spore
The much anticipated Spore, arriving later this year from Maxis and gaming legend Will Wright this September, will include integration with Google’s YouTube. Players will be able to upload videos of their Spore creatures to YouTube while playing the game, and an official Spore channel on YouTube will feature the best contributions from the community. I got to sit down with an EA rep at a recent games preview event, and I was shocked at how well-thought out and integral the community aspect was for Spore, and the YouTube integration represents yet another great addition.
AOL Buys Bebo AOL bought Bebo, a mega popular (in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand) social networking site for $850 million. While the acquisition price has been widely panned as too expensive, it does underscore the importance of social sites being popular in countries other than the United States, and how MySpace and Facebook are not the only real players.
Time Warner announced it is planning on splitting apart and selling its AOL division in multiple parts, getting rid of all or most of the ISP/internet portal/software/communications company. First to be sold will likely be AOL’s online service, the ISP that used to be king of the internet access world. Many are theorizing that once unburdened by AOL’s past, AOL’s search and portal might be served up as an acquisition target for Google.
Should Google buy AOL, if offered at a decent price? Probably not, unless we’re talking super cheap, like under $3 billion. Otherwise, AOL would be a better fit being bought by IAC. AOL Search could be redirected to Ask Search, and AOL.com could become the portal of IAC/Ask. AOL has a lot of properties IAC could use a lot more than Google, if IAC has the cash to go for it.
photo of the Time Warner Center, another beautiful photo by wallyg under CC license
While Web 2.0 junkies may talk about Google Maps all the time (and, once in a while, other innovative companies, too), MapQuest remains the untouchable king of online maps. Well, MapQuest is finally un-untouchable (touchable? nonuntouchable? ~untouchable? untouchable-less?), thanks to Google Maps more than doubling its market share over the last year, rocketing past a slipping Yahoo Maps to seize a strong second place.
Google was up 135% in 2007, while MapQuest traffic was flat over the last year. Google’s change in its search results to only show links to Google Maps, and not MapQuest, pushed so much traffic to Google’s own mapping product that it made all the difference in market share. In fact, the change was so quick and dramatic that Google may be up 135%, but it is only up 7% in the last six months (the change occured in March).
Right now, MapQuest owns 50.25% of the market, down 2-4 percentage points in the last twelve months. Google, meanwhile, has 22.2% market share, up from around 10%. Yahoo fell from just under 20% to 13.34%, and Windows Live Maps was mostly flat, finishing up perhaps a small fraction of a percent.
Earlier this year there was some guessing as to when Google would make something of the slice of AOL they purchased. Nathan had a tidbit of news and a realistic idea as to what Google might be working on. The idea was to marry AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, into the same chat interface found in Gmail. That way Gmail users could also chat with their AIM buddies without having to sign into AIM using their external chat client.
Well, nearly a year later, two years after a joint press release said something like this would happen, that idea has become a reailty. First thing this morning when I signed into Gmail and went to set my online status to unavailable, I found a familiar icon in my list of options. The AIM icon shows up near the bottom of the menu, allowing Gmail users to sign into AIM and access their buddy list in the same Chat area of Gmail.
Once you have selected “Sign into AIM”, a small new pop window appears. Simply sign in using your AIM username and password and your buddy list will be imported into your Chat list. When you are all finished or wish to sign out of AIM, click the drop down arrow to change your status and the text changes to “Sign out of AIM”.
If a user in your Chat list is online using AIM, you will see the AIM icon to the right, and if they are using an away message you will see their status color as orange and their away message will display below if applicable. This new addition to Gmail brings Google another step closer to simplifying, yet improving the online user experience. This is useful for the user who is not on their own computer, i.e., at the library, in a computer lab or a friend’s house. It would also not require users to have the AIM client installed on their computer.
Ryan Douglas manages Paid Search and Comparison Shopping Engines for PlumberSurplus.com, an online retailer of home improvement products including Bathtubs, Sump Pumps, and Bathroom Sinks.
It’s been 21 months since Google Finance, Google’s financial news, information and stock price site was launched, and that ComScore chart above shows that it doesn’t really have any more users now than it did a year ago. Google’s that hot pink line at the bottom, representing 1.5 million monthly unique visits, well behind leader Yahoo’s roughly 38 million, MSN’s 20 million, AOL’s 12.2, and CNN Money’s 6.7 million.
Why does Google have so little upward movement that in the last 12 months, Yahoo has gained as many users as Google has in total, seven times over? Google may promote its own Finance product at the top of search results, but it also links to Yahoo, MSN, CNN, MarketWatch and Reuters, giving itself no more real space than the competition. Plus, the Finance chart it inserts on certain searches actually discourages users from seeking further information.
Universal Search is useful for users, but it doesn’t seem to do any good promoting other Google services. In the long run, it may have more value convincing users to stick with Google search than convincing them to switch away from search verticals that are extremely popular at Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else.
On a related note, it’s been just over a week since Google removed the Google Video link from its search link bar, and it gets more annoying every day. I really miss having an easy way to get video search results.
Two years ago next month, Google bought five percent of AOL for a billion dollars. Yeah, you might have forgotten that, but it was a really big deal at the time. While Google’s main motivation was to keep being the search technology for fifth-place AOL Search, there was a lot of talk on both sides about the two companies working together. The big get, mentioned right in the press release: Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger integration.
What the hell happened? It’s been two years, and the two products have made less effort to work together than the U.S. Congress. Granted, development on Google Talk has gone dark, with a second version of the product either not in development or massively delayed, and AOL’s rising star software division suffered massive multiple layoffs that have decimated their ability to ship good products and hold talented engineers, but interaction between the protocols could have been done quickly if someone had made it a priority.
As we do every once in a while, we’re hearing more leaks about supposed GTalk/AIM integration, this time in the form of leaked screenshots of a future Gmail build. If Gmail Chat gets AIM integration, that would be great news, but if it gets it and Google Talk doesn’t, it might be time to declare development of Talk a dead project. All the new Google Talk features seem to be happening in other projects, while the desktop client lies fallow.
There are a bunch of search engines and other websites running special logos today for Halloween, and here they are:
YouTube’s is simple and very effective, a pumpkin replacing half the logo:
It’s the sort of logo Google used to do, before they started treating this thing as art half the time. Don’t know what I mean? Just look at the complexity of Google’s Halloween Doodle:
Spooky, but it also looks like a lot of work. Remember the days where it was obvious the most important tool for creating a Google logo was cutting and pasting?
Yahoo is running this cute little thing, another one of their animated Flash logos:
If you don’t have Flash, you’ll see this simpler static image:
Even AOL’s getting into it, with their own animated Flash logo:
(reload the page to see any of the animations from the beginning)
There’s also Technorati (it works better on a green background:
And Ask.com, they’ve gone full page with another of their huge exciting designs, using this:
Which came out liks this:
And don’t forget Dogpile:
Finally, Search Engine Roundtable has an animated logo, which you’ll have to go there to see. Here’s a screenshot of it, courtesy of Barry:
One think I loved about Quake and other shooters was hitting the tilde (~) key and bringing up the console and learning all the cool things you could make the game do by messing with it, inputting commands. Turns out the developers of the new Bloglines have included in it a console, too, and you can do a few things.
To bring up the console, hit the tilde key on your keyboard. It should be to the left of the “1″ key. You don’t actually need to hit tilde, leaving out the shift key and hitting “`” will also do.
You will see this message first, followed by a command line:
Type “help echo” and hit Enter to see a list of commands. Currently, it will return this:
# help echo
commands:
echo
set
show
type help command_name for specific help
Any command listed there can be further explained by typing help, then the name of the command. Obviously, “help echo” you just did, but “help set” shows you some parameters you can change. Currently, it gives you this:
# help set
set usage:
set hotkey action key
set theme theme_name
set text text_color
set background background_color
You can set certain action keys, different themes, different text colors and different background colors. you can use the show command to see what of those are available to you to set. Type “help show” and get this:
# help show
show usage:
show hotkeys
show keys
show themes
show profile
Problem is, the show command is disabled, so you’ll have to guess at the “set” commands. “set text” works, but it changes the text color of the console itself. For example, type “set text blue” and it will change the console text to blue. You can keep changing it, then switch to black to make it normal again.
You can also use “set background” to change the background color of the console. The console is much more readable with a black background and white text, so do that. Type first “set text white”, then “set background black”.
Trying to set a theme with “set theme” will fail unless you know a theme name, and I haven’t been able to find any. Another command that works is “clear”, which clears console output.
While I discovered the console last week and didn’t have enough time to play around with it, credit goes to TechOpus for discovering the “help” command that really got the ball rolling. If you can find any other commands comment below or use the contact form and we can further crack this thing open together.
You Gotta love the Webware 100 Awards. With ten winners per category, every multi-billion-dollar corporation can win multiple times, often in every category! Gee, it’s just like the Oscars!
Here’s what Google won:
Google Reader won in the Browsing category, Gmail won in the Communications category, Google won in the Data category, YouTube won in the Media category, GOOG-411 won in the Mobile category*, Gmail Mobile won in the Mobile category, Google Maps Mobile won in the Mobile category, Google AdWords/AdSense won in the Productivity and Commerce category, Google Calendar won in the Productivity and Commerce category, Google Docs won in the Productivity and Commerce category, Blogger, won in the Publishing category, Feedburner in the Publishing category, Google Analytics won in the Publishing category, and Google Maps won in the reference category.
Other companies:
My Yahoo - Browsing; Yahoo Mail - Communication, Yahoo Messenger - Communications; Yahoo Search - Data; Flickr - Media; Yahoo Video - Media; Yahoo OneSearch - Mobile; Yahoo Maps - Reference.
Internet Explorer - Browsing; Windows Live Hotmail - Communications; Windows Live Messenger - Communications; Windows Live Search - Data; TellMe - Mobile; Microsoft Office Live - Productivity and Commerce; Silverlight - Publishing; Microsoft Virtual Earch - Reference.
Everyone else makes an appearance, and in most categories, every major player is a winner. I love award shows where everyone wins. It’s like those Little Leagues where everyone gets a trophy and no one learns to be an adult.
(via The Google Analytics Blog)
* - cough, bullshit, cough. It’s a brand new service, and unless it feeds the homeless, it deserves nothing yet. Category filler.
Nielsen announced today that it has changed the main way it measures the popularity of websites, measuring time spent on a website more than page views. The change in methodology puts Google in fifth place among time spent, even though it has the most unique visitors, while AOL is the top dog on the internet.
I’ve taken the chart and remixed it to show you how things are different between time spent and unique visitors:
If you combine YouTube and Google’s numbers and the Microsoft and MSN numbers, Google has a huge lead, and even with the combined numbers only gets fourth place. Microsoft’s combined numbers don’t move it up, but it does halve the distance between it and Yahoo.
Apparently, Google gets 67.15 minutes per user, while AOL gets an astounding 272.92 minutes per user. YouTube, despite having all those videos (which you’d think would keep people around), only gets 43.57 minutes per user.
Ionut Alex noticed that at some point, AOL Search moved over completely to the same search engine design as Google. This is useful for anyone who wants the old Google search design (changed yesterday) with the new features, but it’s yet another example of an AOL property using someone else’s design instead of making its own. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out what TechCrunch had to say the last time AOL completely ripped off the Yahoo homepage.
Where do you want to work most? Me, I want to work in a candy factory. As long as they have good dental.
20.58% of all questioned listed Google in their top 5, compared with 10.78% for Apple, 7.82% for Microsoft, 4.8% for Yahoo (#22), 4.71% for IBM (#23), 4.24% for Amazon (#26), 2.96% for eBay (#42), 2.37% for Dell (#53), 2.13% for HP (#59), 2.05% for Time Warner (#63), and 1.78% for the CIA (#74). Glad to see a good number of the top 10 are soul-sucking investment companies.
(via MacNN > Findory)
Cynthia Brumfled at IP Democracy writes about Time Warner’s quarterly earnings report, focusing on the AOL division. While AOL’s overall revenues declined by $398 million (from $1.957 billion to $1.458) as the subscriber base collapses in on itself, its advertising revenue increased 40%, or $157 million, to $549 million. As a result, while total AOL revenues fell, profits rose 27% to $542 million. That, to me, means AOL is transitioning well from its old subscription revenue to new advertising revenue, and that they will ultimately make it out of this tough phase intact, and a healthy company.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ll know that an overpass in Oakland was destroyedon Sunday in a little bit of fiery carnage (that made for some good television). You’ll also be pleased to know that Google Maps, as well as Yahoo Maps and AOL’s Mapquest, updated their driving directions to not send you into the disaster site, mostly within about 48 hours. According the AP, Yahoo was first, at 39 hours, followed by Google Monday night, and Mapquest not until Tuesday night.
Of course, being the AP, they can’t resist blowing things out of proportion:
If you went to Google, Yahoo, AOL or another mapping site to plot a route from San Francisco to Oakland in the hours after an oil tanker exploded, they would have sent you driving over a collapsed overpass engulfed in flames.
Really? Is that what would happen? Did emergency officials not close the road, or put out the fire, just sitting back and hoping no one was relying on a map? Be serious, people.
As I touched on when the AOL guy mentioned it at an SES New York panel earlier today, AOL has launched the AOL Marketplace, where AOL will sell Google ads on AOL properties. Since Google provides the ads for AOL Search, this allows AOL to sell ads on its own properties within the Google system, giving them two streams to maximize the ad sales on their sites, and make up whenever Google doesn’t provide enough.
Also, it allows advertisers to buy ads on the AOL portion of the Google ad network, targeting AOL’s users, and not Google’s entire giant base. As the AOL rep pointed out, AOL’s users are of a very high quality, being likely to buy and thus more valuable, so advertising purely on AOL properties, or adding extra AOL-only advertising on top of a Google ad campaign, can be a pretty good idea.
In other search ad news, the state of Utah has decided it is going to police copyrights on the internet, demanding all keyword advertisers consult Utah’s database of copyrighted terms and not use any competitor’s terms. Forgetting about that such actions are almost certainly legal and protected by the First Amendment, the idea that Utah can legislate over the entire internet is kind of comical, and it is stupid of that state’s legislature to think that this is ever going to work.
It’s official, we are definitely in the middle of a massive multi-industry war on the level of the RIAA/filesharing and other major technology wars of recent memory. Today, the war entered its third major stage, with many of the opposition joining forces to announce a YouTube competitor, coming this summer.
The chronology:
Pre-war ops: Various companies and startups enter the video sharing arena. YouTube (2/15/2005), Revver (11/2005), Break(1/2006), Blip (5/2005), Metacafe (7/2003) and many others form, hoping to gain the user base to eventually make money. Google Video (4/13/2005), MySpace Video (1/23/2006), MSN Soapbox (10/2006), and other major companies try to gain a foothold into the emerging market, and other small players get bought up by large companies trying to gain a share of the pie, including iFilm (acquired by MTV 10/15/2005) and Vimeo (acquired by IAC 8/2006).
Catalysts: December 17, 2005: Saturday Night Live presents Lazy Sunday. Spurred by the popularity of the video, which NBCU later demands be removed, YouTube gains many new users and media attention. YouTube has hit the mainstream, and has never looked back.
Stage I - The Alliance: November 13, 2006: Google annexes YouTube. Mere hours after both Google’s own Google Video and YouTube signed treaties with major music companies, Google trades $1.65 billion in stock for control of YouTube’s mindshare and army of loyal users.
Stage II - First Strike: February 2, 2007: Viacom demands Google remove over 100,000 videos, and March 13, 2007, Viacom sued Google for one billion dollars, striking at the popular YouTube, which is rapidly becoming a significant competitor for its audience. Viacom’s lawsuit, if successful, would open the door for similar lawsuits by every video copyright holder on Earth, burying YouTube and bankrupting the service. It is a battle YouTube cannot afford to lose.
Stage III - The Coalition: March 22, 2007 (today): NBC/Universal (NBC, General Electric) and News Corporation (FOX, MySpace), two of the largest forces in television, announce a competitor to YouTube. The service, a joint effort of the two, will launch this summer, will pool content from TV shows on NBC and FOX networks.
The joint service will give preferred access to those videos to Google’s main competitors, Microsoft’s MSN and Yahoo, as well as Time Warner’s AOL and News Corp.’s MySpace, shutting out Google from important content, and opening it up to more lawsuits if users upload NBC/FOX content to YouTube.
This mega-coalition, NBC/U-NewsCorp/FOX/MySpace-MSN-Yahoo-AOL, represents a huge threat to Google/YouTube. They have the media clout, advertising partners, web traffic, and money to beat back YouTube, which has not (and thus far cannot) developed the revenue streams for Google to use in this combat. While Microsoft and Yahoo have not found a way to beat Google at search, the keys to the internet, they can use YouTube to bleed Google dry, and thus making this a win-win for every single internet company that joins the fight.
The fact is, you may like Google, but Google is bad news for every large internet corporation. It is too large, too scary, too capable of being a threat in other companies backyards. Google has one hit, but in it holds the keys to creating future ones, by designing or buying companies and taking over verticals. It is in the best interest of every Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/IAC/MySpace on the internet that Google just go away. Superpowers make competition difficult, while a splintered market is great for all to compete in.
Can Google win this one? Can Google outspend its rivals? Can Google someone not have to spend away all its cash on a defense? Was YouTube Google’s biggest mistake? We’ll see.
I can’t wait for Stage IV. My guess: YouTube wins a deal with the only remaining network, ABC. Google CEO Eric Schmidt uses his position on Apple’s board to leverage negotiations with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, a Disney board member, to put Disney/ABC content on YouTube. Possible future moves: An iTunes collaboration for Google, and a settlement with Viacom that saves Google from a dangerous legal precedent.
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I am so sick of the news on this blog being, on average, a week old. Its my fault. I let these tabs build and build and build, and I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy amassing tabs, and when I finally do write something, it’s a week old. Dammit! I am so not doing this anymore. I hate missing news, but it is beyond stupid to have late and irellevant news because you don’t want to miss anything.
And because of that, here’s everything I’ve got, leading up to just about today:
Google acquired video game advertising company AdScape, which everyone knew was coming. They are competing with Microsoft’s acquisition, Massive, which is far more massive and successful. Google will likely use an automated system and have the same success they had with dMarc, which is to say, none at all.
There’s an easter egg in there. In most of the themes, just visit the page at 3:14 am (get it? Pi time!) and you’ll see something funny happen. Screenshots at Google System.
Google AdSense is doing Pay-Per-Action ads, that pay out when the user clicking the ad actually does something, like buy something or fill out a form. The ads come with a rotating product format, and even embeddable text links, so you can write about a product and link to it as an ad, just like an Amazon affiliate link.
Arrington’s right when he says Google has crossed a line here. We’ll have to see if they’ve crossed the wrong line. Hopefully, unlike the Google referral ads, Google will never make this available to all AdSense publishers, instead holding it for trustworthy publishers.
Philipp has done this page that puts search queries from AOL’s privacy leak of last year with random images from Google Images, resulting in fun and poignant statement. My favorite is when the dog says, “I’m searching for ‘cute glitter myspace’”
Google is classifying some “second class” employees as hourly workers, with compulsory unpaid lunch breaks and other breaks, limits on overtime, and the “threat of a black mark on the review of anyone who fails to punch in properly to the time-tracking window on their desktops.” Yoiks.
Yahoo has released a new version of Yahoo Widgets, the former Konfabulator. New features include a Widget Dock, auto-updating widgets, hidden widgets, 40% improved performance/memory usage, a FLickr widget, and lots of stuff for widget developers.
