Webware

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)

Google is giving brands and content publishers another way to track YouTube viewership metrics by letting them view it inside of Google Analytics.

Brands can now keep an eye on information that had not previously been available through YouTube's built-in Insight analytics system, including bounce rates, page views, stay time, and whether certain users are coming back for more.

It also takes the same geographic information that's been available in Insight, and lets you fine-tune it within the Google Analytics maps overlay, which includes additional filtering tools that can narrow down results by segment. Brand owners are also able to compare these numbers to existing goals from benchmarks or advertising campaigns.

Google is pitching this as an easy way for companies to use the popular video service as a big focus group, which is a fair statement. Commercials or other promotional content can be watched repeatedly and at any hour of the day. Users are also able to rate the video and leave feedback, either in the comments or by private message.

Compared to having advertising on a Web site, or more traditional media like TV and radio, this gives the ad more of a "long tail." More importantly, by giving these brands a way to access more of the information than they could on YouTube alone, it's a very casual approach to getting them to start using its analytics service; something that can be a gateway toward using Google's AdWords program.

Dropio has launched a new applet called Playlistio that allows users to post music to the cloud in just three clicks. According to the company, users can find the file, upload it to the cloud, and stream it anywhere they can find a Web hookup and connect to Dropio. And with the help of the company's new Apple App store application, Droppler, users can even stream their Playlistio songs through their iPhone. The free applet is available now.

Google announced Tuesday that it has launched a new skills qualification program. Dubbed Google Analytics Individual Qualification, the new feature will allow users to demonstrate proficiency in Google Analytics.

According to the company, it will provide a free online course that covers Web analytics techniques, as well as Google Analytics implementation and administration. The company hopes that businesses will require their IT professionals to take the course and become more skilled in Web analytics. And in the process, Google is hoping that its qualification will join a laundry list of others that IT professionals are encouraged to have.

Shoeboxed, an online receipt depository, has partnered with FreshBooks that will allow users to export their receipts directly to the online invoicing company. Any Shoeboxed customer can have their receipts scanned into the service and export them to FreshBooks. No fee will be charged, but to use the new Shoeboxed feature, users will need to register for both sites.

Online customer review site PowerReviews announced Monday that it has moved from a subsidized pricing model to a paid subscription model with monthly subscription fees. The company also announced that it has launched a new service called AnswerBox, which is a question and answer tool that allows knowledgeable customers and staff to address questions posed by shoppers. The new tool and revenue model, which was designed to help it survive the economic downturn, are live now on the company's site.

In other PowerReviews news, the company has also announced that it's working with eBay's ProStores, a customizable online store service, to provide access to its customer ratings for ProStores' merchants. The service will be available for free for 30 days and after that period, the customer will be given a limited-time 15 percent discount off the standard $80 per month charge.

Every once in a while, you read something on Twitter that's just pitch-perfect, despite (or maybe because of) the microblogging service's 140-character limit.

Today's honor is bestowed upon numbers guru and "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day" author Avinash Kaushik, currently employed as Google's analytics evangelist.

On Monday, he posted a total zinger, framing it as an "OH," or overheard, indicating that he wasn't the one who actually came up with the contents of the Twitter message (or "tweet") but didn't want to openly quote the person who actually said it.

"Social media is like teen sex," Kaushik tweeted. "Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it's not better."

Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. (Do you agree? Comment away!)

(Credit: Compete.com)

Unless you have been inhabiting the underground bunker formerly occupied by Dick Cheney, you've probably seen loads of press coverage over a "25 Things About Me" Internet meme that was spreading on Facebook. Basically, members would create a Facebook "note" containing 25 facts about themselves, and then "tag" 25 friends encouraging them to do the same.

Yes, it was a bona fide phenomenon, but I avoided writing about it, because I thought the whole thing was...dumb. Internet memes of that nature have been around since goodness knows when. Breathless press hype over it seemed a tad silly.

But here's something legitimately interesting. Analytics firm Compete.com says that there may actually have been a boost to Facebook traffic as a result of "25 Things," at least in the U.S.: 60 percent more Facebook profiles were created in January than in December. That's not surprising, because Facebook still requires a user account to access all its content--curious newcomers who read about "25 Things" would need to register for accounts in order to explore it.

More noticeably, U.S.-based traffic to Facebook's "notes," normally one of the social network's quieter features, skyrocketed. Four times more visitors than usual hit up the notes feature in January, according to Compete, with 28 percent of Facebook's U.S. users checking them out. (The wildly popular photo-album feature usually draws 60 percent of visitors, for comparison.)

The caveat is that Facebook continues to grow fast and so some of this could be attributed to natural growth rather than "25 Things" momentum. That said, Facebook's U.S. growth has long since started to stabilize--three-quarters of its new users now come from overseas.

Compete has said that its analysts will be posting a blog entry about this later in the week, ideally with some more insight into just how much those annoying "25 Things" lists really did catch on. I've also pinged Facebook to see if they have any internal numbers on the topic.

Here's what'll be interesting to see, at least from my perspective: Will this mean that the newfound popularity of "notes" will last? I post photos, links, and other share-able items to my Facebook profile all the time, but I think I've written a Facebook note a total of once (to alert my friends list that I'd lost all their phone numbers in a personal-electronics mishap). Note-writing always struck me as something that was a little bit too promiscuous for the mainstream Facebook user, the sort of thing that navel-gazing, overshare-prone Twitterers would spring for but which didn't fit in quite as well with the directory-like nature of the social network.

Guess I was wrong. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after all, likes to say that Facebook has incrementally made the Web's masses more comfortable with sharing more and more information. The success of "25 Things," consequently, must be one of his great triumphs. And now he knows all these useless facts about so many millions of people.

Heaven forbid: Facebook notes could be like a gateway drug to blogging for everyone.

This post was expanded at 9:51 a.m. PT.

It's sort of cute, really: blogger Robert Scoble went on a nice snowy stroll with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg while the two were in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. Of course, he wrote about it.

Most of what Scoble wrote about his conversation with the young CEO is either information that was out there already or tidbits like the fact that Zuckerberg was teaming up with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to work the coat check at the World Economic Forum's annual Women's Dinner (aww!), but there was one fairly interesting part: apparently, Facebook is doing some extensive research into tracking user sentiment, and it has a lot of data on hand but isn't yet sure how it will be used.

"Facebook is, he told me, studying 'sentiment' behavior," Scoble wrote. Keep in mind that he's not actually quoting Zuckerberg, so this may be a bit general. "He said that already, his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is under way. He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of 'going out' kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of 'hungover' messages on Saturday morning. He's not sure where that research will lead."

We've had a peek at this already with Facebook Lexicon, the social network's trend-tracking search feature. It also sounds a lot like what some people are suggesting as a signature use for Twitter and may explain Zuckerberg's apparent onetime interest in acquiring the microblogging company.

More importantly, this is basically confirmation (via Scoble, of course) that Facebook has significant amounts of intricate data on hand that it hasn't released yet. It may sound creepy, and privacy advocates may be wringing their hands already, but for Facebook, this could be a quick answer to the profitability question.

NOTE: As it turns out, Zuckerberg was participating on Friday in Davos forum, along with Microsoft's Craig Mundie, YouTube's Chad Hurley, Adobe Systems' Shantanu Narayen, and others. The live Webcast has come and gone, but it looks like an archived version might show up eventually on this World Economic Forum Webcast page.

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

Yahoo on Wednesday announced the rebranding of IndexTools as Yahoo Web Analytics (beta). Currently an enterprise product, the move brings it closer to being a consumer and small business tool, although it's not available to everyone just yet.

Yahoo acquired IndexTools back in early April and promptly made it a free service. Its big advantage over Google Analytics is that the information is updated within a few minutes of user activity. In comparison, stats from Google tend to take about 24 hours, however anyone can sign up for it. Both products feature colorful, easy-to-read charts and graphics for data reporting, deep tie-ins with each company's ad services, and a single-service user log-in that works with other company properties.

According to a post on Yahoo's blog the updated version of the service is already out to advertisers and third-party application developers, with Yahoo Small Business users to follow. If you try to sign-up on the new site, there's simply a wait list where you can subscribe to updates. Yahoo's Director of Data Insights Dennis Mortensen says the easiest way to get your hands on this before Q4 is to become an advertiser.

You can read more about the changeover here. I've also embedded a five-minute overview of what the service did (five months ago) after the break.

Yahoo's new Web analytics dashboard is clean and colorful, although unless you're an advertiser you're not bound to see it until 2009.

(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)

If you're too impatient to wait for Google to release its own iPhone app or Safari-optimized version of Google Analytics you might want to check out myAnalytics. This $1.99 iPhone application (app store link) lets you see a general overview of how your sites are doing, and stores the data locally on your device so you can access it when you're away from a data connection. Considering Google's most recent release of Analytics requires Adobe Flash, this is the easiest way to get it short of getting your hands on a real computer.

While convenient, it is worth noting that myAnalytics can get bogged down if you intend on using it for more than eight different sites. Also, the current version only shows you basic numbers and a small chart, unlike Google Analytics, which lets you dig deeper into each component of your site. Version 1.1, which is coming soon, will let you view each individual stat on its own graph, which is a good start.

Related: Sergej Müller's mobile Safari-friendly version of Google Analytics (Note: this only lets you see page views and visitor counts.)

If you're trying to access Google Analytics on the go you can avoid looking at the Flash cube of fail, and instead see some simple, and colorful graphs and charts with myAnalytics.

(Credit: iphone-analytics.de)