Webware

YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site.

While it's nice to see YouTube embracing Facebook more and more, it stops a bit short of being an impressive Connect implementation. YouTube is getting there, but seems to be lagging behind a little in this department. An implementation that shares, on Facebook, what you are watching, on YouTube, would certainly make sense, although it might clutter up users' Facebook profiles if they are a prolific YouTube watcher. For now, the addition of this new feature is a welcome inclusion and serves as a great way of getting trusted recommendations for videos to watch on YouTube.

YouTube's new Facebook Connect feature.

(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

YouTube said this feature is in "test mode" for the time being. In my testing, I was not able to get this feature to actually work. This can be sometimes be expected while YouTube irons out the kinks with new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. If anyone has better luck, let us know in the comments.

Susan Boyle's first appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" tallied the most worldwide views on YouTube for 2009, the video site said Wednesday.

The video of the once-unknown singer captured more than 120 million views.

Her video was followed "David After Dentist" (37 million views), "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" (33 million views), "New Moon Movie Trailer" (31 million views), and "Evian Roller Babies" (27 million views).

YouTube also looked specifically at which music videos tallied the most views for the year.

Pitbull's "I Know You Want Me" had more than 82 million views this year. That was followed by two Miley Cyrus songs--"The Climb" and "Party in the U.S.A"--with 64 million and 54 million views, respectively. The Lonley Island's "I'm On a Boat" and Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down" rounded out the top five.

You may notice that Michael Jackson videos, surprisingly, didn't capture more views than the top clips of the year. According to YouTube, the pop star's "Thriller" video was one of the fastest rising searches but it failed to acquire enough views to push it into the top five most-viewed videos.

In a nod to efficiency, YouTube on Thursday began testing a more lightweight version of its video player pages called "feather."

Feather pages do a number of things to speed up the video-playing process, from defaulting to the standard quality version (instead of high quality or high definition), to removing various on-page features such as being able to control the size and coloring of an embed. The idea is to get the video playing as soon as possible with fewer on-page distractions.

Other efficiencies include limiting the number of loaded comments to just 10, which users are now unable to vote on or respond to. Video replies, real-time sharing, and auto-suggest from YouTube's search bar have also been cut. However, related videos remain--albeit at a more limited 5 videos compared to YouTube's usual offering of 21.

Users who want to try out the new interface can do so by opting in to it on YouTube's TestTube page, which houses experimental, or otherwise not-so-ready-for-primetime features. These include YouTube's visual warp browser, its live streams product, and comment search tool. Once it's enabled, it can quickly be disabled from any video page with a little green box that sits on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

It's worth noting the feature does not yet appear to work on all videos just yet. We had the best luck on popular videos, including those from YouTube's featured section. Also, if you're a YouTube power user who regularly makes use of things such as video replies and user comments, it's worth staying on the standard version of the service.

Below you can see a before and after of feather mode on the same video. Click it to enlarge.

YouTube's new feather mode ditches many of YouTube's advanced features in favor of a faster-loading page.

(Credit: CNET)

You know that apocalypse thing we're always being told might be just around the corner? Well, do you feel the chilling breeze? Do you feel the troubled twittering in the trees?

For here is a tale that I know you will discuss with your loved ones, perhaps with other people's loved ones, even with your psychological professional, the minute you hear it.

It appears a man called Dana Hanna is standing at the altar on November 21. He utters those most solemn vows about how he will love and obey or whatever it is that married people claim to do these days.

The officiant pronounces that Dana and his lovely bride, Tracy, are now married. Does Dana weep? Does he kiss his bride?

Ah, no. For Dana's Twitter moniker is TheSoftwareJedi and his first loyalty is to his digital followers. So, much to his wife's surprise, he whips out his cell phone and updates his statuses on both Twitter and Facebook. Right there at the altar. He also hands his wife's cell phone over to her.

Now that he has uploaded the evidence (which we're assuming isn't staged), Dana insists that this was all done for fun.

Indeed, he explained on YouTube: "I have a lot of family scattered around the country and we all use Facebook a lot to keep in touch. So when Tracy and I were engaged, most of my family found out via Facebook because we updated our statuses."

If you're wondering what it is he tweeted from the altar, here it is: "Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where just a second ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #weddingday"

However, another tweet sent on Monday night by Hanna, who is chief architect of NextDayPets.com and president of Torian Technologies, might perhaps offer an even greater insight into his complex and socially networked psyche: "Just changed over the laundry for @TracyPage and was thrown off by the fact a bra was in there. Not used to living with a woman again."

Oh, Tracy, are you sure about this? I only ask because I just tried to access the Tracy Page Twitter feed and received the message "this page doesn't exist."

Google is ready to launch an ambitious attempt to provide captions for videos on YouTube.

The company is holding an event in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to announce that it has developed a way to use the voicemail transcription technology in Google Voice to allow videos to be uploaded to YouTube with captions automatically generated. Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, will host the event highlighting Google's work in bringing this technology to YouTube.

Ever since 2006, Google has allowed those uploading videos to first Google Video, and then YouTube, to place captions in their videos so that deaf or hearing-impaired viewers can follow what's going on. However, there's only about 100,000 videos on YouTube (out of the hundreds of millions on the site) that use the caption option because of the time and expense of transcribing a video, uploading a caption, and timing it properly to the action onscreen.

Warning that results may vary at first, Google engineers later this week plan to turn automatic captioning loose on the YouTube Education channel for videos in English. YouTube will also activate a feature that lets video uploaders do their own transcription but syncs up the timing of the caption itself, so long as all the words in the video are present in the text file uploaded along with the video.

Google plans to demonstrate the automatic caption technology later on Thursday.

SAN FRANCISCO--At the NewTeeVee Live conference on Thursday, YouTube director of product management Hunter Walk announced that the video-streaming service is getting a new high-quality streaming option: full HD, or "1080p" resolution. The current "high-quality" option, when available on YouTube videos, is 720p, referring to the number of horizontal scan lines that make up the image.

Walk said the new resolution, as well as a new full-screen player, will roll out to all users within days.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen announced high-quality YouTube viewing at NewTeeVee 2007. He also said, then, that YouTube stores all video it receives at the resolution it's uploaded at. So when YouTube ads a resolution option, as it did then and is doing now, it simply needs to re-encode videos for the new player, not get new raw content.

Walk said that about half of the 1080p content in the YouTube database has been re-encoded so far.

Only about 10 percent of playbacks on YouTube are now in the high-quality player. Walk said that this is due in large part to the fact that for many viewers, hardware or bandwidth limitations prohibit high-quality viewing. Also, more content is coming in from mobile devices than ever. "We've seen about a 2,000 percent increase in mobile uploads this year," Walk said. Update: A YouTube spokesperson contacted me with this correction: "This is incorrect. It's HD uploads that have grown from 1% to nearly 10% over the course of 11 months."

Other changes afoot at YouTube: The team remains interested in a non-Flash video player. "We're interested in broad accessibility," Walk said, reminding the NewTeeVee audience that the company has demonstrated an HTML 5-based YouTube player. "We keep an open mind," he said.

So what, exactly, is Google planning to do with On2 Technologies' video software?

The search giant isn't saying. The planned $106.5 million transaction isn't going to make too much of a dent in Google's coffers, but the transaction comes during a hot debate about which future technologies will power Web video. CNET News' Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit pondered the implications of the deal, and here's what they thought:

Shankland: When I heard about the acquisition, I immediately wondered if the move could tidy up the mess that is that Web video or clutter it up even more.

On2 offers video compression technology that's used, among other notable places, in Adobe's Flash software and the Hulu video site. The company licenses various "codecs"--the software used to encode video so it's compact enough to squeeze down a narrow Internet pipe, then to expand it at the other end. It's a major technical challenge--one that's getting more important people to spend more time watching online video and more companies to attempt to profit from that.

Krazit: Well, it all depends on what they do with it, right? Google's being coy about this particular acquisition, but there really are only two reasons to do this: open-source the codec and throw a third wrench into the HTML 5 video tag standards debate, or bake it into existing technologies like YouTube--in hopes of getting that business to start making money--or mobile software.

At the moment, my bet is on the YouTube-mobile option: does Google really want to risk holding up HTML 5 adoption any further, regardless of the hint they dropped in the press release that "video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform"?

Shankland: Those alternatives aren't mutually exclusive. Google might just be buying trying to lower its costs by sidestepping YouTube's current streaming technology, which uses Adobe Systems' Flash software. Dan Rayburn, executive vice president at StreamingMedia.com, says Google doesn't have to pay Adobe fees to use Flash at YouTube. But Laura Martin, an analyst with Soleil-Media Metrics, believes that using On2 technology could trim YouTube's network bandwidth costs.

In the long run, though, getting On2's technology accepted as a built-in Web video standard could help both YouTube and Google's grander ambitions for the Web.

Google controls Chrome, of course, but getting the other 97 percent of the browser world to move will be harder. When it comes to building support for Web video straight into the Web, rather than using a plug-in such as Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight, Apple's Safari uses H.264 while Mozilla and Opera use a license-free alternative called Ogg Theora. Chrome will support both, but Internet Explorer doesn't have any support at all.

Right now, that video variety has been a thorny issue for the effort to hammer out HTML 5, the next incarnation of the Hypertext Markup Language that's used to describe Web pages. Even though the video tag looks like a big part of HTML 5, specification author (and Google employee) Ian Hickson so far isn't naming a codec.

Krazit: "Thorny issue" seems like an understatement. Why would injecting a third standard (that not everyone believes is necessarily a superior option) make sense, at this point? I suppose that there's a Clintonian "third way" argument to be applied here, in that if Apple and Mozilla are lining up on opposite sides of the debate over H.264 versus Ogg Theora, a freely available version that has clear patent ownership collected in one place might solve some of the sticking points on either side. Still, we'd be once again dependent on Google's "Dude, you can totally trust us. We're Google!" argument that it won't later subvert the standard with patent claims.

Not to mention the fact that Microsoft and its Internet Explorer are still unlikely to play ball, no matter what Google proposes.

Shankland: Well, one way Google could win over Mozilla at least is by releasing the codec as open-source software. That may or may not be possible, depending on what On2 has had to license, but Google apparently isn't happy enough with Ogg Theora's quality to bring it to YouTube, according to Hickson.

But I wouldn't rule out Microsoft quite so fast, even though I'm sure that it would like to get as much royalty revenue as possible through Silverlight video streaming and its own video codecs. Google has an affinity for open-source licenses such as Apache that permit use of code in proprietary software. That could reduce the philosophical barriers to Microsoft. And if Google can offer a high-quality codec in the HTML 5 standardization effort, maybe making On2's codec into open-source software could help coax the Internet Explorer team on board.

Let's not forget that HTML 5 is under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and they don't like standards encumbered by royalty constraints.

Also, if I were writing standards, I'd favor codecs such as On2's that also work on mobile devices. The iPhone doesn't support Flash, and I'm sure that Google wants YouTube on as many handsets as possible.

Krazit: Google's trying to pull off a lot these days, when it comes to making the Web the future platform for developers. It's a huge proponent of the HTML 5 push, devoting an entire day of Google I/O in May to explaining why this move is so important, and preaching to developers about how open standards and browser-based development are the wave of the future.

But you'd think that at some point, the company would start thinking of ways to differentiate its own products against the rest. Chrome and the forthcoming Chrome OS are ostensibly being developed with the hope that they will gain traction in the market. How will they do that, however, if they are just cookie-cutter versions of the same standards-based technologies on which everybody else jumps?

One way would be through offering excellent video performance that isn't widely available to the rest of the world, i.e., keeping VP8 and future On2 codec derivatives either in-house or available for a fee. Is Google going to open-source everything it ever develops under the strategy that anything that gets people on the Web ultimately comes back to its bottom line? Surely, that can't scale.

Shankland: No, Google won't open-source everything--and stop calling me Shirley. The company loves improving the Web as a foundation for applications, an effort that needles companies such as Microsoft or Apple that have their own developer ecosystems to nuture. But when it comes to the applications themselves--Gmail and Google Docs, for example--Google isn't so into sharing.

So I guess that some of this On2 situation comes down to the extent to which the video codec work is an end or merely a means to an end, like Chrome.

Krazit: Google isn't saying, at least for now. There's little doubt that online video is a crucial component of the future Web (CBS' David Poltrack is telling television critics this week that big money is coming to online video), and something will need to assume a role as the future technology enabler of Web video.

In the end, however, it must be nice to be able to make $100 million bets with relative ease. Nothing could come of On2's technology, and Google would hardly be worse off than it was a day ago.

Updated 1:24 p.m. PDT with new information about Flash licensing and YouTube expenses.

Google on Wednesday made a small change in YouTube's privacy settings that lets video creators share their viewing statistics with viewers.

Google has had Insight, its built-in, user-friendly analytics tool, since late March of last year, but up until now, only the user who had uploaded the video could see the extended information about who was viewing it. The new option gives general users the same amount of access to that information as the content owner.

The toggle, which lets viewers see the Insight information, can be turned on for all your videos at once. Users can also choose to deny the feature from appearing on specific videos by editing that particular video's privacy settings. It also appears to be an opt-out program, as it was already turned on for me on two of my accounts.

Google says that sharing viewing data with everyone can be a nice way for YouTube partners to attract potential advertisers who would not have otherwise seen metrics like gender, the sites visitors were coming from, and what parts of the video they watched. However, some uploaders may find the optional feature to be overkill.

Note: This post has been corrected since its first publishing. It originally stated that YouTube users could not turn the feature off for specific videos.

Detailed information about who has watched a YouTube video is now available to viewers if the creator says it's okay.

(Credit: CNET)

Double time, Molly.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

There are some videos that drone on--business presentations, product demos, and online driving school--and others that rush by too quickly. MySpeed is a fun, free-to-try bit of software that serves as a playback remote so you can watch Flash videos at your own pace.

The simple app consists of a sliding bar that's set to 1.0, regular time, when a video plays. Slide it to the left to slow the sound and picture, or to the right to speed both elements to two or three times the original speed. You can also use shortcut keys to quicken or slow the video. Crtl+Alt+F makes it faster; Crtl+Alt+S drags it down.

The audio and video largely remained in sync when tampered with, but original trip-ups in streaming and buffering were more noticeable with the video accelerated. If you don't set MySpeed to start on boot-up, you'll need to open it each session. After that, it'll run in the background from the system tray.

MySpeed is an amusing, sometimes time-saving utility for YouTube and sources of Flash video. However, for the $30 post-trial asking price for the Windows app, it's clearly aimed at very frequent video watchers, especially e-learners who may want to breeze by some sections of a module and stroll through other, more technical segments.