Tag: google

Google to Buy Valve? WTF?

Google Valve!

Holy shit, did anything even remotely think of this? The Inquirer reports a breaking that Google may be buying Valve any second. And why this seemingly random move? Google most probably wants to acquire Steam, Valve’s trusty and super-successful content distribution service. So is Google taking it’s first step in the video game industry by bridging the Internet and video games?

There is no doubt that Steam is the greatest, most effective and most awesome content distribution ever. It looks like Google is interested in distributing content around. Owning Steam would definitely be profitable for Google, but it would only enforce peoples’ opinions that Google is turning into a Microsoft-ish monopoly with their webby hands over everything related to the Internet.

I personally think that the acquisition will still give Valve some space, a bit like the Activision-Blizzard merger, I’m thinking. But Google will definitely want Steam for itself. I just hope they don’t change the default theme to their boring white-blue nonsense, that just sucks.

YouTube Auto Plays ALL User’s Channel Videos

[Update: Ok seemed like a glitch. Only Partner accounts have the auto-play feature.]

I don’t know if this is a glitch or if YouTube is keeping this feature. Previously only YouTube Partner videos auto-played, but now all user channels auto-play.

YouTube has been under scrutuny for how it measures views. Auto-plays used to count as a view, but now that every channel has auto-play enabled, I would imagine that auto-plays no longer count as a view.

I was pretty pissed off when I went to my channel and saw the video auto-play. At first I thought I had become a Partner. Nope.

Now anytime I visit my channel I’ll have to hear myself. How annoying.

Google to launch knowledge-sharing service, “Knol”

Google Knol

Google, the internet giant that was originally a humble, but powerful search engine has now manifested into one of the most important corporations into the world. In its goal of encouraging spread of knowledge, Google now has an e-mail service, an online office suite, a social networking site, two of the world’s largest video sharing sites, the largest blog hosting site, and so on.

Now Google is turning to the knowledge-sharing section of Web 2.0 with its under-development service titled “Knol” (supposedly a “unit of knowledge”). This appears to be a weird cross of Facebook, Wikipedia and Instructables, and I can already foresee it going big.

Unlike Wikipedia, though – Knol will emphasize on authors, as opposed to topics. Everyone will have a cute profile, and will be rated by the community depending on how good their articles are. The goal of the project is, as you might have guessed, to encourage people to open up about a topic they know a lot about. While good in theory, this may not exactly be the best thing out there.

YouTube sounds good in theory – a video sharing site. Browse through now and you’ll see some of the worst and most banal videos the internet has ever known. Since Google has stated that they will in no way directly serve as moderator or editor to Knol, there’s perfect chance that Knol will be ruined by the millions of teenagers who think they know a lot about something.

The site will host anything from outlines of a topic to in-depth articles to how-tos and just about anything that educates the reader. Google also hints that authors will also be able to use Google AdSense to generate money from sharing knowledge. This reminds me that Knol may just end up to be a pseudo-blog site with people posting on how to manage girlfriends, instead of a long, emo poem on how their girlfriend dumped them. Best community website ever? I don’t think so.

Then again, since there is so much of an emphasis on authors, there’s perfect chance that a lot of real talent can be highlighted here. If you ignore the unwashed masses, you might just find a few geniuses worth listening to (try YouTube as a comparison).

What do you think of all this? Is Google really doing good with this, or are they just money-hungry executives masquerading as internet geeks, monolopolizing the Internet? Love Google’s idea? Think it should be different? Post it all into the comments!