Webware

Just a few short months after adding videos as an optional add-on in Google Maps, Google seems pleased enough with the feature to have built it into the popular mapping tool. By choosing the video layer from the "more" menu, which also houses photos and Wikipedia entries, users can now browse and watch YouTube videos that have been geotagged.

The feature is no different from the previous one except in presentation. Instead of pockmarking your map with little red dots, each video appears in thumbnail form. The interface has also been slimmed down to exclude the video information and view count, letting the player fit in a smaller amount of space.

(via Google Blogoscoped)

Google Maps now offers YouTube videos as an official part of the interface. To toggle it on just click the check box in the 'more' menu.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past three years you've watched a YouTube video off of YouTube.com. So many viewers watch videos this way (YouTube says it's 44 percent of viewership), the company has overhauled its player, making several of the site's latest features available off of YouTube's site.

The biggest change is the inclusion of annotations and closed captions, meaning if you're watching a video that has them added you'll see them as the video plays. This includes the latest translation feature too, so if you're watching a foreign video with foreign subtitles you can translate it in real-time.

Additionally, YouTube now includes a search bar on the top of the player, which appears with related videos as soon as you finish watching. The results show up within the player, so if you've got an embedded video on your blog it's not going to jettison your users somewhere else.

Still missing from the embedded player is a way to tweak between low and high quality, view and leave comments, and get the quick links to share videos on social networks--all things you can do on YouTube's site.

You can see a quick overview of the new tweaks in the video below:

If there's one bothersome side effect of getting a long Web video sent to you, it's getting to the good parts. In some cases, the part your friend wanted you to see could be a few minutes in, and you might not have the time (or patience) to sit through the rest. A service called Splicd fixes this, by letting anyone drop in a YouTube video URL, then pick the start and end point.

It's not a very pretty implementation, but it works. You've got to manually plug in the start and end times, which requires skipping around to the part you want in YouTube, then heading back to Splicd. Once it's worked it through, you get a permalinked page that you can share with friends.

What's nice about this system is that it doesn't require extra time to re-encode the video; when you've put in those changes it's instantaneous. The downside to that is that the finished product cannot be shared outside of Splicd's site.

I expect that YouTube will eventually offer such a feature in its own player. Competitor Viddler has offered it for some time now, and with that system you can control those times on embeds, too.

Here's a clip I put together from a longer one, although in this case you might want to watch the full video to understand what's going on.

[via Lifehacker via Life Rocks 2.0]

Over the weekend YouTube quietly began testing a new uploading tool for users to publish their videos. The tool now allows users to begin plugging in information fields about the video while the upload is happening, much like Viddler, Vimeo, and others have offered for years. The company is testing the new player with a small number of its users, although you can access it with a special link.

The new uploader lets you edit data while the video is uploading. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The company has also increased the size limit of uploaded video files from 100MB to 1GB. This should open things up dramatically for people who are shooting in high-quality VGA video mode on their digital cameras, something that can turn a one-minute video capture into files that would have exceeded the previous limits.

The updated uploader also now lets users upload multiple video files at once. You can either do this when selecting the file, or while any previous videos are in the process of being uploaded. The tool allows for up to 10 videos a time, which means you can start up additional clips as soon as older ones have made it through. Doing so does not interrupt whatever file is currently uploading, which is a nice touch.

Two things that have not changed with the uploading process are the video time limits and long processing times, both of which are the same. Videos are capped at 10 minutes, and you still have to wait longer than your video's length for the system to process your video for viewing. As for the processing, there's nothing you can do, however, if you want to get longer-form videos on the service you can try your luck at becoming a YouTube partner which lifts the cap.

Related: YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do video better

On Friday morning, YouTube announced the second annual iteration of its YouTube Video Awards. What? Awards?

The video-sharing service, owned by Google since 2006, awarded accolades in categories like "Adorable," "Creative," and "Comedy" to original videos hosted on its site that were uploaded in 2007, as voted on by users. The prizes, per YouTube, are "bragging rights, a trophy, and a special invitation to an event later this year."

Okay, so the videos are kind of amusing. The "Adorable" category winner is a video of a baby who falls over every time he laughs (wonder what'll happen when his friends find out about that in 10 years), the "Creative" winner is that "Human Tetris" thing you've seen a million times, and the "Music" winner is none other than that "Chocolate Rain" video that everyone was watching last year.

But the culture of YouTube doesn't really lend itself that well to awards. YouTube, for better or worse, is a cultural hub rather than strictly a creative outpost; there's plenty of cool, original content there, and it's no surprise that Google would want to highlight the good stuff rather than the goofy prank videos and pirated content that propelled it to the upper echelon of the Web.

Content on YouTube, however, doesn't necessarily become popular because it's high-quality or original--just look at the Rickroll phenomenon, an '80s music video that has been seen millions of times because people get a kick out of tricking their friends into watching it. Or the current hot clip, a British public service announcement with a hilarious twist.

Or, for that matter, this week's number-one YouTube video: Barack Obama's most recent speech.

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that the success of the soon-to-be-released Flickr video depends largely on how much the company borrows from its photo hosting roots and innovations.

While YouTube and various other video hosts I partake in are fantastic for content, the films many people capture on their digital cameras tend to have no editing or post-processing whatsoever. These same videos can be a hell of a lot more interesting when put into context, which is where discovering videos on blogs or people's personal sites can bring a little more to the table than simply plopping them in with the other mass of videos on other hosting sites.

Flickr's popularity, in part is because of its community who are incredibly active and fill the site with a massive amount of content. However, the site's development has remained somewhat stagnant, which is where the inclusion of videos is the single biggest change since its inception. With that imminent change, there's a lot to talk about regarding how video will play into Flickr's current structure.

What Flickr does right

Let's start out with what Flickr video needs to have compared with features the site already has for its photo service.

Flickr's 'interestingness' quantifier might be a useful feature for discovering cool videos. The same process can be seen here for photos.

1. Interestingness: Flickr's killer application is the "interestingness" algorithm. This automates the process of discovering some of the very best photos on the site simply by keeping an eye on natural user activity. If the same thing could be applied to videos, we'd have a much richer selection of naturally popular clips to view without any sort of special voting system or editorial control.

2. Organization: This includes things such as sets, collections, and tags. While nearly all the other video hosts have these features, Flickr needs to let you mix in your video with related pictures from the same set and do it seamlessly. At the same time there needs to be a way to separate photos from videos and browse each type of media on its own.

3. Push video to the API: Another reason Flickr got huge is because the public API, which lets all sorts of services tap into the data and make changes from outside of Flickr. YouTube just released its advanced API and it's the way of the future. As we've seen with services such as Digg over the past year, the results can be exceptionally cool if you let people create tools with your data.

The only thing that keeps me from thinking the company will do this is its stance on letting its members use Flickr as a host without linking back. Flickr may decide to let videos be shown offsite, or without any of the branding, but there may be strings attached--like a branded player with ads.

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Despite the immediate threat of a hostile takeover by Microsoft, Yahoo's kicked it into high gear. In just two weeks Yahoo has released a hot new product (Yahoo Live), announced mobile social communication tool OneConnect, acquired online video platform provider Maven Networks, killed off its music service and replaced it with Rhapsody, and launched a completely new version of collaboration suite Zimbra.

This morning the parade of changes continues with the relaunch of Yahoo Video. Besides an all new layout, Yahoo Video is coming a little closer to YouTube. It is emphasizing editor-chosen content alongside the most popular videos on the service. One of them being the new trailer for Indiana Jones, which oddly enough looks significantly better, and is available in HD on Yahoo's Movies property.

The Flash video player (the most important part of the service) has been given a face-lift with slightly higher resolutions and a new wide-screen display that can be embedded on blogs or other Web sites. User file size limits have been increased to 150MB, letting users upload larger videos files sizes that tend to come with wide-screen clips. Standard 4:3 video simply plays in the player with black bars on each side.

Yahoo Video has an all new look and wide-screen player. Oh yeah, and there's that trailer for the new Indy movie.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Also revamped are personal profiles. Users can create playlists and embed them on third party pages. Like YouTube's efforts, there are tiny thumbnails for each clip, and the creator can swap the order and choose whether it plays continuously.

New to the mix are "networks," which are a simple way to browse content by genre. The videos come from various Yahoo properties, and each network is skinned to match. It's a distinctively different feel at each network, and does a much better job at encapsulating content and the feel for each brand than YouTube's efforts with its partner channels.

I've embedded an example of the new video playlists after the break. Also, if you want to read more about the update, Yahoo's got a full listing of the changes on the Yahoo Video blog.

To use the worst of bad plays on words, YouTube has thrown itself into the Ocean: Youth-oriented mobile carrier Helio announced Wednesday that it has souped up the YouTube video offerings for its Ocean handset.

Owners of the double-keyboard smartphone are now able to upload videos to the Google-owned service more easily, fill in various criteria for them (privacy settings, tags, descriptions, categories) and "geotag" them thanks to the handset's GPS capability. Additionally, the Ocean YouTube application facilitates access to some of the social-networking features previously unavailable to most mobile versions of YouTube--rating, commenting, and access to personal videos through a full log-in.

The enhanced mobile YouTube is available free of charge on the Ocean, which has a 3G mobile Web connection. It's not the first time that a handset manufacturer has touted YouTube integration--Apple's iPhone prominently features a player for the wildly popular video-sharing service, and LG makes a "YouTube phone," the KU990 Viewty.

The new YouTube on the Helio Ocean.

(Credit: Helio)

But Helio considers its YouTube interface to be a step above the fray, and apparently YouTube's honchos agree. "Helio has taken the mobile YouTube experience to the next level," Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder and CEO, said in a statement from Helio. "This innovative application offers people even more customization and provides them with instant access to interact with the YouTube community whenever and wherever they go."

Helio, a joint venture between EarthLink and SK Telecom that offers a regularly changing lineup of handsets, apparently has a new phone on the way called the "Mysto." No details on the gadget are available aside from a $150 price tag and a screenshot that appeared in the December issue of hipster fashion magazine Nylon.

But even though Helio continually rolls out new gadgets and high-profile partnership deals like the YouTube application, the company's future is still up in the air. The company has yet to convince the public that its business model can succeed, especially as competitors like Amp'd Mobile have shuttered.