Tag: Web 2.0

YouTube gets new layout, “statistics”, “commentary” tabs

Youtube new tab design

Our ingenious eyes have spotted that YouTube has updated its video page layout. While the look itself isn’t dramatically different, we notice that is cleaner, neater and tidier. You also now have the ability to share on Facebook, Digg or MySpace directly! The rest of the page also functions smoothly and helps improve usability.

Of note are two new tabs; “Commentary” and “Statistics & Info”. Commentary is basically a union of the video responses and YouTube’s infamous comments that have gone down as being better reading than Victorian literature.

Statistics & Info appears to house details like how many sites have linked the video (including links to all of them) as well as stuff like how many honors it has (and which ones, specifically!).

Observing the white space to the right of the views counter, we also see a button for choosing between normal and HD resolutions – a much-requested feature! This one is currently only available on some videos (because not all videos are HD, you dummy), so don’t expect to see it everywhere.

All in all, while we’ve seen much better looking video websites, this layout is a welcome change as it makes the average day of browsing baby videos and people getting hit a more neater and tidier experience!

[poll=22]

NBC Videos Get a new player, it’s not Hulu

NBC has updated its video site with a brand-new player. These videos differ from it’s Hulu.com website as they are news oriented rather than fictitious shows.

Apparently NBC has truly learned how to go web 2.0! It’s allow third party websites to be able to embed their videos onto their own pages. Ok that’s not really an original idea or that exciting, but the player itself is responsive and the video quality is great. Of course there are ads and there is no way for video embedders to earn a percent off of the views they bring to these clips.

NBC definitely has the content that people want to watch, but if they could build a network like the AP’s The News Room – bloggers would be all over this service. If a website is bringing in viewers to your content, they should receive some sort of credit for doing so. The future for online video is going to be perfect for both content producers and syndicators, if syndicators are able to receive royalties for bringing views to ad supported videos created by the content producer.

We here at StuffWeLike will at some point have this capability for our media player The Pipeline so it’ll be interesting to see how that affects the usage of it.

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!

Flickr’s Two Billionth Photo

Flickr’s 2 billionth photo

You might have an account on Flickr. Heck, you might have even posted a dozen photos of that geek party you held last year that nobody commented on. Well, you might be pleased to know that you just lost the race to get the 2 Billionth image on Flickr.

Over here at Flickr, you can see that lucky little yukesmooks posted image #2000000000 on Flickr. The photo, whose preview you can see above is of some sort of a tree (or something that looks like some sort of a tree) and was taken at Market City in Chinatown Haymarket in Sydney. Nothing spectacular, in my honest opinion.

I suppose the next thing to look out for will be who gets image #2500000000, or #3000000000. Here’s a challenge from StuffWeLike: post image no. 2185510267 on Flickr and we’ll give you a special hug.