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 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.
The groups responsible for standardizing the language used to build Web sites have begun tackling technology to provide a direct interface to Webcams.
The World Wide Web Consortium has begun work on the HTML Device addition to the Hypertext Markup Language specification. "The device element represents a device selector, to allow the user to give the page access to a device, for example a video camera," according to a December 11 draft of the specification.
The move marks another step expansion of the scope of the Web standard. Advocates are trying to make it a foundation not just for static Web pages, but for interactive Web applications; the latter benefits from the direct access to hardware that applications running natively on a PC enjoy.
HTML is jointly overseen by two groups, the World Wide Web Consortium and the less formal WHATWG (the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) that branched for a long interlude when the W3C wasn't interested in HTML. Ian Hickson, a Google employee, is editor of the new HTML5 specification under development. The HTML Device specification, though is part of a broader HTML effort.
The WHATWG draft of the HTML Device specification has wider options, including interfaces to "a USB-connected media player" and an RS232 port, the latter an ancient standard, in computing-industry years, for serial communications.
But, the draft WHATWG specification cautions, "RS232 is only included below to give an idea of where we could go with this. Should we instead just make this only useful for audiovisual streams? Unless there are compelling reasons, we probably should not be this generic. So far, the reasons aren't that compelling."
TwitVid, a free video host for Twitter, is launching two new, useful features on Monday. The first is a real-time search engine that will let users sort through videos both on TwitVid and YouTube. The other is an analytics engine that lets video owners know more about who is watching their uploaded clips, and where they're from.
Between the two, TwitVid and Twitter users are likely to get more utility out of the new search engine. Similar to what OneRiot has done with its own real-time search engine, TwitVid's approach takes into account how fresh the video is, along with whether it's been popular on social sites. Recently popular videos then get better real estate on the results pages. It's a big step up for TwitVid users, who up until Monday had no way to search through videos other users had uploaded on the site.
As for the new analytics tools, TwitVid breaks down some very basic information, including when people were watching your video. This is charted out down to the hour, day, week, month, and the total lifetime of that video. The service also shows where your viewers are coming from--or at least the top 10 locations. Included as part of that list are links to the top referrers, which can show you if your video got picked up somewhere.
TwitVid made its debut in March and competes with TwitVid.io (not .com), TwitLens, Twiddeo, Twitc, Posterous, and Tweetube--just to name a few.
Previously: TwitVid app lets you send iPhone videos to Twitter
The new analytics features let video owners see where their videos are being played as well as information on the people watching them.
(Credit: TwitVid / CNET)
About 81 percent of Web users leave an online video page if they encounter mid-stream rebuffering, a new study from video analytics firm TubeMogul has found.
Rebuffering has become a major issue for most Web users. And even though TubeMogul found that just 7 percent of streaming video is slow-loading, it said Web video still can't quite match TV-quality viewing.
"The technology just isn't there yet to have a TV-like experience," David Burch, marketing director at TubeMogul, said in a statement. "And if it's an advertiser hosting video on a branded site or distributing it across the Web, people are just clicking away when they see that spinning wheel."
TubeMogul conducted its study by sampling 192 streams from leading content delivery networks--Akamai, Limelight, Edgecast, and Bit Gravity to name a few. According to TubeMogul, the services it tested "help to power video across thousands of sites." But they aren't quite doing as nice a job as some users had hoped.
TubeMogul found that Limelight performed best out of all the services it tested, experiencing slow load times just 4 percent of the time. It was followed by Panther Networks, Akamai, Edgecast, and BitGravity, respectively.
Although slow load times are still a problem on the Web, it's not stopping people from attempting to view streaming content. A recent Nielsen study found that online video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the last quarter, compared to a year prior. Now the CDNs just need to catch up.
Got a case of information overload? You're not alone.
A study released Wednesday from the University of California, San Diego, reports that the average American consumes a whopping 34GB of data and 100,000 words of information per day.
Over the course of 2008, Americans as a group gobbled up 3.6 zettabytes of data. (In case you missed the definition of "zettabyte" in your daily data binging, that's a million million gigabytes.) For all you visual learners out there, the researchers helpfully point out that 3.6 zettabytes is equal to the "information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska."
Between 1980 and 2008, the number of bytes consumed by Americans increased 350 percent. The average annual growth rate was calculated at 5.4 percent.
Here's how TV and the Internet stack up in the "How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers."
(Credit: University of California, San Diego)Dubbed the How Much Information? project, the study measured data consumption both at home and away from home. It includes several information sources, "including going to the movies, listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and reading the newspaper."
Besides bytes and words, the study also noted the number of hours spent consuming information.
In terms of time, traditional media still has a strong hold on the U.S. The study reported that "a large chunk of the average American's day is spent watching television." On average, 41 percent of an American's day is given over to watching television shows, viewing recorded TV, or watching DVDs.
Noncomputer sources, the study says, account for more than three-quarters of U.S. households' information time.
But if bytes are the standard by which American days are judged, it's the video game that takes the top prize. Researchers found that the average American consumes 18.5GB of gaming data per day, representing 67 percent of all bytes they consume daily.
"Games are almost universal, but most of the gaming bytes come from graphically intensive games on high-powered computers and consoles, which have the equivalent of special-purpose supercomputers from five years ago," report author Roger Bohn, director of the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, said in a statement. "Games today generate their bytes inside the home, rather than having to transmit them over cables into the house, but gaming is increasingly moving online."
The study found that 16 percent of daily information consumption comes from the Internet. A staggering 79 percent of all American two-way communications is done through the Internet.
If you want to see what else UC San Diego found in its study, click here.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
For a while, some believed that the Web and social networks would limit the amount of time people spend consuming video content. But Nielsen's latest A2/M2 Three Screen Report has found that people are actually consuming content on more platforms, thanks to digital video recorders and the Web.
According to the report, which looks at content viewing on television, the Web, and several other platforms, online-video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the third quarter. DVR use was up 21.1 percent, the study found. Surprisingly, 99 percent of video content that's watched in the U.S. is done on a television. So, while Web use is on the rise, it still has a long way to go before the television is supplanted as the "go-to" for consuming video content.
Nielsen shows off video viewing by demographic.
(Credit: Nielsen)Nielsen also looked at how much time the average American spends consuming video content on their TVs, from the Web, or via mobile devices. The company found that the average person watched 31 hours of television per week during the third quarter of 2009. Just 31 of those minutes were spent in playback mode on their DVRs.
Web use, while higher than it has been, was still much lower than television use. Nielsen said that the average consumer spent four hours on the Internet during the third quarter. That user watched an average of 22 minutes of online video per week. Meanwhile, mobile-video consumption was lagging far behind in the third quarter, accounting for just 3 minutes per week of the user's time. Unsurprising to some, teens watched the most video content on their mobile phones, averaging seven hours of mobile-video consumption per month.
A few other interesting tidbits of information: TV viewing followed closely with age. Those aged 65 and older watched an average of 43 hours of television each week, while the average person between the ages of 18 and 24 watched 22 hours of television each week. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 watched the most video content online, averaging 35 minutes per week.
Click here to see the full Nielsen study.
Immediately following the Friday night broadcast of MTVU's alternative-music awards show, the Woodie Awards, viewers will be able to watch a 360-degree video of it online.
The Immersive Media technology supporting the online video, scheduled for online availability at 8 p.m. PST, is designed to enable users to freely navigate around a video, 360 degrees, letting them explore angles and shots that they wouldn't normally have been able to see.
While I haven't seen the Woodie feed yet, I did have a chance to play around with the technology on some test videos. The video experience seems perfectly suited for a concert format. It's certainly something worth checking out, even if you don't particularly care for the music, which is scheduled to include performances by Death Cab for Cutie, The Dead Weather, Matt and Kim, and Passion Pit.
This is the first big event for the IM Live technology, so it should be interesting to see how the experience of the fully produced show on TV compares to the IM Live video experience, in which site visitors essentially become their own producers. If you end up making your own comparisons, let us know what you think.
Zynga, the social-gaming developer behind the wildly popular Facebook game FarmVille, announced on Thursday that it has launched a new game for the social network, this one called PetVille. The news was originally reported on the Games.com blog.
According to the company, PetVille allows Facebook users to "raise, dress, and care for a pet" that they've created. Gamers can also visit friends' in-game houses and "play with their pets to earn coins you can use to make your own house the coolest on the block!"
Although PetVille's userbase pales in comparison to Zynga's FarmVille, which currently has almost 70 million active users, the game has already added 125 gamers as of this writing and more than 400 people have become fans of the title. Considering the popularity of Zynga's other games, it's likely that PetVille will enjoy the same kind of success.
If you're a FarmVille fan or you just like playing games on social networks, you can check out PetVille by clicking here.
See also: Facebook games to hold you over until Civilization Network
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)
