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Google’s recent acquisition of the mega-popular YouTube raises some interesting hypothesis for the future of online video sharing.
If you’re one of the four people left in the country who has never heard of YouTube, it’s a site that allows its users to upload their video clips for all the world to see.
Usually described – incorrectly in my view – as a sort of global ‘You’ve Been Framed’, the site plays host to millions of clips ranging from a few seconds up to feature length videos.
And it’s certainly addictive. Browsing YouTube reminds me very much of the early days of the web, when I would go online to seek out one thing and then find myself hours later off on the widest of tangents, having completely forgotten my original intention.
YouTube cleverly displays what it considers to be clips of similar content to the one you are currently viewing, ensuring an endless trail of breadcrumbs to follow.
Far more than simply short videos of teenage Americans miming to their favourite pop song, as it is most commonly described, YouTube is a rich library of many notable things shot to film over the past few decades and it provides an easy and free platform for would-be documentary makers to have their work seen.
I believe it is for this reason that Google considered the $1.65bn takeover to be good value for money.
Broadband internet connections make it feasible to deliver TV quality video and movies online, instantly making the medium available to the woman on the street and not just wealthy corporations like the BBC or Sky.
Today, with some cheap, consumer-level video equipment and a popular idea, anybody could make a ‘TV’ programme and distribute it globally for effectively no cost.
It’s a massive revolution and it’s happening right now.
Other companies are also seeing the potential in IPTV (Internet Protocol Television).
One of the best examples of this new broadcasting medium is Revision3, a company that produces an ever increasing portfolio of interesting and professional quality free programming with subjects ranging from cookery to technology news. All shows can be subscribed to via the iTunes Store ensuring automated delivery as soon as they’re available.
Forget a few extra channels being available on Freeview. The internet has the potential to offer unlimited content.
The richness of today’s web browser experience makes it possible to do all sorts of things online that used to require extra software. Email, word processing, spreadsheeting, photo editing, calendars and to do lists, even relatively sophisticated gaming are all achievable within a browser.
Online applications have the huge advantage of being computer independent, allowing you to save and retrieve your documents and information from any internet-enabled PC, anywhere in the world.
But this advantage is, ironically, also the main disadvantage of creating and accessing your data over the internet. What happens when you are not connected?
A solution to this problem is being tackled by Google which has just released Google Gears (gears.google.com), an open source extension to web browsers which allows offline interaction and functionality with traditional online applications.
One of the first sites to use Google’s Gears technology is my favourite ‘To Do’ website, Remember The Milk (RTM).
RTM now offers an ‘offline mode’ which, it promises, lets you do all the things that you’d normally do online without that all important connection. As soon as you go back online again, any changes or additions you have made to your tasks and notes are synchronised.
This is a very exciting project which I shall be eagerly following.
Why everyone should have a Google Mail account
December 27, 2007 in Comment, Google | Leave a comment
I’m a huge advocate of Google Mail (Gmail), the search giant’s web mail service which I have now been using in preference to every other web- or client-based email application for the past three years.
My two main addresses – work and personal – both feed into Gmail giving me a single place to store and sort all communication.
I’ve found that other service provider or web-based accounts don’t have anything like the level of intelligent spam filtering that Gmail offers, with it regularly taking out over 100 offers of cheap drugs, watches and other nonsense every day.
That aside, the one killer element to Gmail which makes it impossible for me to switch back to any other email software, is the way it groups correspondence into conversations.
For anyone not familiar with this concept, as you participate in an email discussion with somebody on a particular subject, rather than a flood of new emails arriving with a title that starts RE:, Gmail simply bundles them together chronologically and then shows a number after the sender’s name to indicate how many exchanges there are in that particular conversation.
I find that some work emails can include multiple contributions from people and all manner of back and forth questions and answers. To have these all bundled into a threaded discussion that you can read as a single flow of correspondence is uniquely useful and I’m surprised that others haven’t copied the idea, particularly as software like Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird include options to highlight similar emails. If they can do this at the click of a button, why not group them together by default? It makes life far easier to organise.
Gmail’s other great draw is that is continually evolving and bringing in new features.
Christmas saw the increase of allowed storage to a huge (and growing) 6GB and we’ve recently had useful innovations with colour coding of categories and a noticably faster interface where a clicked email is displayed almost instantly regardless of internet connection speed.
Labelling, tagging and now visually colouring discussions based on particular subjects is a geniusly inventive way of assisting with email organisation and I couldn’t be without it.
Integration with Google Calendar and Google Documents is the icing on the cake with more goodies promised for 2008.
Gmail accounts are free and available from mail.google.com. Grab one.