Webware

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.

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.

If social gaming is Hollywood, the people aren't as pretty. Well, maybe the avatars are.

Yes, yes, we know that social games are taking over the bloody world: earlier this week, gamemaker Playfish announced its $300 million sale to Electronic Arts, and on Thursday, rival Playdom retorted with the announcement of $43 million in venture funding at a $260 million valuation, and the acquisitions of smaller gaming companies Green Patch (manufacturer of Facebook-based games like Lil Green Patch and Farm Life) and Trippert Labs. Green Patch's games will up Playdom's reach on Facebook by 30 percent, the company said.

Expect to see more of these sales, as smaller developers find they're having trouble treading water in an industry where the big guys--Zynga, Playfish, Playdom--have chomped up most of the market share, and where Facebook, the biggest destination for these games, has shown that it can change the rules at whim. And the big companies, too, want to scramble to get bigger.

Plus, as Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson explained to CNET News: When gaming companies grow large, they have to deal with a lot of stuff that can get in the way of producing new games and staying on top of consumer trends. That's one reason to keep investing in new talent through acqusitions.

"The hitmakers start spending all their time on operations, and on things that don't improve or enhance the games, and so they become essentially owners and operators," he said. And likewise, "people who can create things shouldn't necessarily be operating a gaming company."

He drew the evolution of a social gaming company parallel to an entertainment studio: "a lot more like Hollywood or the traditional gaming industry" than a Web start-up.

But here's the catch when it comes to acquisitions in this space: Gaming, especially social gaming, is a hit-driven business. If a parent company buys up a hot Facebook game, that game could already be running out of shelf life: which is, indeed, sort of like a Hollywood establishment signing a contract with an actor who's had five hit films in a row, as he could easily be over the hill before long. (Hello, Rob Lowe.)

"I think we're getting pretty good at really looking at their data now, and modeling how these games will evolve over time," Thompson said. "But I think there's essentially a life cycle of growth and then decay. What we really look at in acquisitions is not just daily active users, but bringing on additional team members that can really help create new games in the future."

Mint launched a new tool on Thursday that gives users real-time updates on the latest personal-finance topics hitting Twitter.

Dubbed Money Tweets, the personal-finance service's new feature tracks tweets about everything from investing and saving to the most popular finance-related topics at any given time. It also has a "question of the day" option where Mint poses a question and displays all the tweets that answer it.

Mint was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million.

To ensure Money Tweets doesn't list any tweets that might be offensive or contain links to potentially malicious sites, the tool's Topics section includes tweets from trusted sources, like The Wall Street Journal and Morningstar. It also displays messages from prominent bloggers who write about the respective topics.

Aside from finances, Mint even added a "Tweets about Mint" option. When a user clicks on it, they will see all the tweets that reference Mint. It even displays tweets from users who have bad things to say about Mint. That's commendable.

I had a chance to check out some of the content in Money Tweets. You can check out useful content on several topics. And since many tweets feature links to outside content, you'll probably find yourself visiting several finance sites with a lot of interesting financial content. Overall, I like Money Tweets. It's a nice addition to Mint's current slate of services.

Click here to check it out.

As part of its continual push to speed up the Web, Google is taking a look at one of the most basic connections: the conversation between Web servers and browsers.

For almost forever, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) has been the standard that allows Web servers and computer browsers to understand each other, transforming the bits and bytes served up from a Web publisher into a Web page in your browser. But Google announced Thursday that it's working on project called SPDY (pronounced, of course, "speedy") that it feels could make everything faster than HTTP currently allows.

"We want to continue building on the Web's tradition of experimentation and optimization to further support the evolution of websites and browsers. So over the last few months, a few of us here at Google have been experimenting with new ways for Web browsers and servers to speak to each other, resulting in a prototype Web server and Google Chrome client with SPDY support," wrote Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon, software engineers at Google, in a blog post.

In lab conditions unlikely to be duplicated in the real world, Google said SPDY allowed Web pages to load up to 55 percent faster on some of the Internet's biggest sites. "There is still a lot of work we need to do to evaluate the performance of SPDY in real-world conditions. However, we believe that we have reached the stage where our small team could benefit from the active participation, feedback and assistance of the Web community," Belshe and Peon wrote in their blog post.

Techcrunch clarified with Google that it is not planning to advocate one day flipping a switch and moving from HTTP to SPDY, but rather has a more gradual plan in mind where SPDY plays a role in addition to HTTP. One interesting development to watch will be whether Google plans to keep this as a Chrome-only enhancement, or whether it plans to advocate it as a Web standard within the browser community.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile debuted in October as Microsoft's answer to smartphone app stores. As with Google's Android Market, Windows Mobile 6.5 users could initially only find and purchase apps from the device. Now Microsoft has published an online catalog to mirror its mobile storefront.

As with iPhone's app store in iTunes and BlackBerry's online App World, Windows Marketplace for Mobile site lets you find apps by browsing, searching, or discovering programs from lists of what's most popular or new. App screenshots, ratings, and version details are accessible from product pages. Like BlackBerry's App World, you can pick apps from the online catalog to install via Marketplace for Mobile on your smartphone.

In addition to discovering new applications to download, the online mobile Marketplace has a management window for you to track your download history and tweak your account settings.

Developers will see a separate portal that contains community resources, blog posts, and lists of upcoming events. Although Microsoft has been the tardiest of the major mobile platform developers to implement an app store solution, it's to Microsoft's credit that the company is quickly rounding out its storefront with an online catalog. Now Microsoft just needs to open up the Marketplace to phone owners using older versions of Windows Mobile operating systems.

Even though Hulu Desktop and other software have stolen its thunder a little, we love Boxee. It was one of the first and best ways to browse streaming media from multiple outlets on a big screen, and we like its indie spirit, even though some content providers have given it a hard time.

Rumors of a Boxee Box--an actual piece of hardware to free the software from a PC--have been floating for a while, but it's becoming real very soon, according to the Boxee blog. Boxee's first hardware partner has been found, and we are already guessing as to what the Boxee Box will have inside. More importantly, how will it compare with Roku? Or, could it possibly be...

A launch event on December 7 in Brooklyn will give a lot more details including mock-ups, and CNET will be there. Look for more then. Until that day, enjoy the kittens.

The online video directory service Clicker launches Thursday at the NewTeeVee Live conference. If you watch TV, you will love this site.

Clicker is not a full-on video search engine like Bing or Google, and it's not a video-viewing site like Hulu. It is, instead, a carefully curated directory of full-length video content, with several extremely nice features and user interface flourishes that make it a good first stop online if you're looking for an episode of your favorite show to watch.

Unlike a search engine, Clicker won't give you every last shred of online video on your search query. If you're looking for the "Dr. Horrible Sing-along Blog" on Bing or Google, you'll get hundreds of clips and related videos. On Clicker, just four: the three 15-minute episodes individually plus all of them combined into one long stream. Each video also has a very good "Related" sidebar showing other videos that are thematically linked. No matter what I threw at it, I found the Related suggestions pertinent.

Clicker's behind-the-scenes engine is constantly crawling video sources to add and remove content as necessary. The "remove" part is key, as many networks take episodes off the Web as frequently as they add them.

In the Clicker interface, an auto-completing search box that's focused just on video makes it incredibly fast to find content. Searching within a show (for example, looking for "Clinton" in the Daily Show page) is also very fast, as the search results change in real time as you type.

When you want to watch a video, Clicker plays it either by linking to the source, such as aggregator like Hulu or a network site like that of CBS or AMC, or it displays an embeddable player. This depends on the content owner's terms of use. Some content is not available for free, but Clicker knows that it can be streamed on Amazon.com or Netflix; Clicker will direct users to log on to their accounts on those services.

This service does an amazing job of taming the morass of online video, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The site has been in private beta for a few months; it is scheduled to go live Thursday at 10:30 a.m. PST.

What's next

But this isn't the end of the story for Clicker. The shame of this product is that it is in many ways a better television experience than you can get on your TV. Unless you connect your computer to your living room TV, you're going to have to sit in front of your PC or laptop when you want to watch a show. A partnership with Boxee will yield a better set-top-like experience for the service, Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone told me. An iPhone player will follow next, and the service will be smart enough not to find videos you can't play on that device.

From a business perspective, advertising will become a part of the model, although Clicker won't try to get in the way of pre-roll videos from the content sources. In some key vertical content areas, though, like health and finance, Lanzone thinks there's a good opportunity. Also, Clicker could end up driving traffic to sites like Hulu and could potentially monetize those click-throughs.

The challenge for Clicker is to get viewers to know about it. A strong SEO effort will be applied to get Google searchers to the site when they're looking for shows. That will help. There may also be privately labeled versions of the service for various institutions. But--and I rarely say this--this service is good enough to grow organically. Once you try Clicker, you'll be back again.

Listen to a Larry Magid discussion with Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Google, ever eager to renovate the computing industry for the benefit of the Web and its own business, is working to link two nascent but potentially significant projects, its experimental Go programming language and its Chrome Web browser.

Specifically, the company is building a foundation to let programs written in Go run directly within a Web browser endowed with Google's Native Client software. Native Client is designed to let browser-based programs run faster than is possible with today's widely used JavaScript; though it's still in its early stages, it's built into Chrome and available as a plug-in for other browsers.

A little poking around the Go source code reveals a reference to NaCl, the abbreviated name for Native Client. And Native Client is indeed on the Go agenda, said Rob Pike, one of the five core members of the Go team, in a Wednesday interview.

"We have an embryonic implementation of the NaCl support for Go using 8g," a compiler that produces code for x86 chips such as Intel's Core line, Pike said. "It's restricted by a couple of details of NaCl's implementation, but we hope to see changes to NaCl one day that will make Go a full-fledged language in that environment."

The Native Client compiler--the tool that converts what people write into software a computer can run--is specially modified to screen out a variety of software instructions that could expose a computer to an attack from a Native Client module downloaded off the Web. And the Native Client software itself checks such modules before they run. The result, if the security approach stands up to security scrutiny, is browser-based software that runs close to the speed of ordinary software that runs natively on a PC.

Native Client has been maturing, the most recent stage being inclusion of NaCl within Google's Chrome browser, though disabled by default for now. Google is using Chrome as a vehicle to distribute other Web technology, too, including Gears, which can let people use Gmail while offline, and WebGL, which gives hardware acceleration to 3D graphics in the browser.

Go is only experimental at this stage, but Google hopes to use it to produce some of the software running on its vast array of servers. Google's scale makes even academic projects potentially commercially relevant, which is enviable to many companies who've tried to get projects off the ground.

Indeed, an episode earlier in the Go team's history is illustrative. Pike, Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson, and Russ Cox all worked on the Plan 9 operating system project that, like Unix, began at Bell Labs. (Yes, Plan 9 is named after Ed Wood's famously bad movie, "Plan 9 from Outer Space.")

Unlike Unix, Plan 9 didn't have much commercial success, although Vita Nuova does sell a version called Inferno. Getting a mainstream operating system off the ground is hard: you must convince programmers, software companies, and hardware makers to embrace it; you must convince people to use it in the real world; and you must keep pace with the evolution of entrenched operating systems.

A bit of Plan 9 lives on inside the Go project, with various Plan 9 tidbits appearing in the Go source code. Pike, though, says there's not much.

"The 6g/8g/5g compilers are almost completely new but are tied to the open-source Plan 9 compiler suite's C compilers and linker," Pike said. "That's really about it except for the obvious historical connection for some of the protagonists: Ken, Russ, and myself."

Programming languages face similar challenges as operating systems in getting off the ground: A lot of interdependent elements in the ecosystem must all be built simultaneously. It's what's known in the trade as the chicken-and-egg problem: you can't make a chicken without an egg or vice versa.

But Google makes things different for Go. It's devoting real resources to the project and believes it could be useful on its own servers to run software such as the Gmail service Web browsers tap into. It's got the chicken and the egg under its own roof.

And with the money Google could save by increasing the performance or efficiency of its servers even just a fraction of a percent, it has abundant financial incentive to make things work.

Marrying Go to browsers is just another aspect of the same issue.

Assuming Go and Native Client mature enough to be useful, Google can't mandate that Web developers embrace them; indeed, they generally haven't embraced Gears even though it can help with some Web site matters. But again, Google has a browser and some awfully big Web sites it can use to get the ball rolling.

Apple released a security update for its Safari Web browser on Wednesday. Available for Windows and Mac, Safari 4.0.4 plugs what sound like moderate to severe security holes. Unlike competitors Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, Apple doesn't rate the severity of its security fixes.

The security fixes address a wide range of problem points. On both Windows and Mac, parsing maliciously written XML content could have led to a browser crash, using shortcut menu options within a maliciously created Web site could have led to the disclosure of local information, and visiting a maliciously built Web site could have resulted in unexpected actions on other opened Web sites.

For Windows only, viewing a maliciously made image with an embedded color profile that could lead to a browser crash or running arbitrary code is no longer a threat, nor is accessing a maliciously crafted FTP server, which could have led to an unexpected crash, information disclosure, or arbitrary code execution. For Mac only, an exploit that could have allowed e-mail to remotely load audio and video content when loading a remote image has been disabled.

Although it's good practice to update a program whenever a security fix has been released, more transparency from Apple on the matter would pull the company up to competitors' standards.

Click here to read the full changelog for Safari 4.0.4.