Googlified

YouTube is now testing a new video player on its site right now. I think the new player looks cleaner, but it removed the “go back” button - which is quite useful in my opinion. If you want to try out the new player, just click on the link below the player and you can always go back to the old player if you don’t like the new one.

UPDATE: You can use keyboard shortcuts in this new player.

Another season, another new design for YouTube. The new design added bigger (but not necessary better) buttons for sharing and bookmarking the videos. It also brings the “Who’s Also Watching Now” into focus, as well as add image buttons () for users to choose between high and low (standard) video qualities.

The YouTube Insight tool got a new feature - Discovery - that allows users to “how viewers found your video, whether by searching on YouTube or Google, browsing under “related videos,” receiving a link to the video from an email or website, or watching it in an embedded player off YouTube.”

Last but not least, the Mac version of the YouTube multifile uploader has been released, you can find it here.

As reported here a while ago, YouTube has plans to include links to AmazonMP3 and iTunes on selected music videos, and it appears that YouTube has started including affiliate links to online music stores on some music videos and selected profiles of musicians. AmazonMP3 offers 10% referral fee to affiliates for successful purchases while Apple’s iTunes store only pays 5%.

Payday for Google.

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

YouTube just released a new tool called YouTube Insight that let’s users to view “detailed statistics” of the videos that you uploaded. You can see statistics like the number of views per day, and break it down by regions. According to the Official Google Blog post, you can find the tool by “clicking under the ‘About this Video’ button under My Account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage My Videos.” (YouTube won’t let me log into the site right now because they are “performing site maintenance”.)

Sounds pretty cool and Analyticstic!

The YouTube Blog just announced the winners of this year’s YouTube Awards. The winning videos include:

• “Laughing Baby” for the Most Adorable
• “LonelyGirl15 Is Dead” for Best Commentary
• “How to solve a Rubik’s Cube” for Best Instruction
• and more on the Winners page

Congratulations to all.

Several websites, including Global Voices, CNet Asia, and Shanghaiist report that YouTube is currently blocked in China, possibly due to the (chaotic) situation in Tibet right now.

[via BoingBoing]

The annual YouTube Video Awards is now back (well, second year)! They will be given out 12 awards this year, including last year’s Most Creative, Most Inspirational, Most Adorable, Best Comedy, Best Commentary, Best Series, and Best Music Video, in addition to the new awards to Short Films, Sports, Politics, Instructional, and Eyewitness. However, each category now has 6 nominees instead of 10.

You can start voting today here and “can vote once per day” (”Vote early and vote often.” - not cool) till March 19, 2008. Winners will be announced two days later on March 21.

Now go and vote, every vote counts (but not every vote is legitimate).

YouTube released an updated version of its API. The new features are:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube: Allows third party websites/applications to upload videos to YouTube and community features like rating videos, post comments and post video responses.
• Add/Edit user and video metadata
• Fetch localized standard feeds
• Customize player UI and control video playback: Lets users to customize the player by adding parameters specified by the API at the end of the URL, including the options for autoplay, looping, and keyboard control.

A JavaScript and ActionScript API were also introduced. They enabled developers to control the YouTube video and get information of the video, such as the video’s size, length, volume.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about YouTube having an undocumented option of playing higher-quality videos by adding an extra parameter at the end of the URL. Well, you don’t have to the extra work anymore because YouTube has added a new setting that enables you to configure what kind of video quality you want for the YouTube videos: higher-quality, standard YouTube poor-quality, or let YouTube decide for you based on your Internet connection speed.

(YouTube should probably define what they mean by fast connection, 3Mbits/s, 30Mbits/s, or 100Mbits/s?)

I personally don’t really care about this unless this setting also includes embedded videos on websites since I rarely get on YouTube. I don’t think it does though.

To configure your setting, follow this link to YouTube and choose your option.

[via CyberNet]

A few days ago I posted about YouTube testing a new personalized homepage, and now they have provided a link which you can opt-in to test the new homepage yourself. The new personalized homepage, as its name suggests, it does emphasis a lot more on personalization (video recommendation for YOU, latest from your subscriptions, friend activities, etc…), but the way they layout the things are just like a cluttered mess (looks better when you collapse the sections).

Of course, you can remove the sections you don’t like, and this is where the real customization comes it. By clicking on the customize this page on the top of the page, you can choose “the modules you want to see on your customized homepage.

The YouTube Blog announced today that they are testing a new, and more personalized version of YouTube homepage. It will “include personalized recommendations, the latest videos from your subscriptions and an easier way to see” your friends’ activities on YouTube. The new version is currently available only to a small group of chosen users, but it will be available to everyone “in the near future.”

In a related news, the Pakistan Telecom lifted the ban on YouTube.