YouTube Kids: Smart, Mobile First, and Child Sized.

In December, I wrote about viewing technology through the eyes of a child. As much as I think of myself as an early adopter and 'with it' net citizen, I'm equally amused and amazed at the activities my own kids rapidly learn and partake in when it comes to technology and the Web, how things and concepts once considered the future are commonplace. And their eyes, unvarnished by the way things have always been, highlight shortcomings in our software and websites that historically have been designed for fully literate adults on the desktop.

I've been particularly excited to watch (and trial) YouTube Kids as it has been developed, and have been eager to see it launch today, the collective effort of sharp colleagues like +Shimrit Ben-Yair, +Pavni Diwanji, +Jonathan Terleski and many more. As they wrote in today's blog post, the new YouTube Kids is "the first Google product built from the ground up with little ones in mind." As a dad of three kids six and under, two of whom who read fairly well and a third just trying to keep up, it's exciting to see them become the focal point for an entirely new interface.

The YouTube Kids Music channel.

My children, from a young age, have been surrounded by touch-enabled tablets. They expect my laptop (and in the case of my Chromebook Pixel, accurately) to be touch-enabled. They use voice search constantly to find what they're looking for, and they essentially expect the world's content to be immediately available. But they tire quickly when apps and sites don't do what they want. That can result in complaints to me, or even a thrown tablet or two from a tantrum.

Without sounding too much like PR-speak, from my own experience, I've seen the YouTube Kids app to reduce any surprises from me in terms of what my kids are watching, they more easily navigate the app, find channels and shows they want, and generally are pleased to have something made just for them.

Browsing shows on YouTube Kids

If you haven't yet tried it out (download on Google Play or iTunes), the app features curated channels, a music area, a learning section, exploration, and the always handy search button. So the colors are bright, the buttons are bigger, and there's no noise in the way.

Browsing the PBS KIDS channel on YouTube Kids

The true measure of whether an app for kids is working is whether the kids ask for it by name, or keep using it instead of getting bored and trying something else. My four year old boy is quick to use the app on my Nexus 9 or Nexus 6, and the twin six year olds are quickly getting used to the new app after lots of their own experience on the standard YouTube app we've all used.

Searching for Minecraft on YouTube Kids

Lucky for us parents who do our best to stay on top of their digital explorations without trying to be overbearing, YouTube Kids makes searching less of a risk. My kids won't go from a G rated topic to an R rated one in a few clicks. Searching for Minecraft (which happens in my house) turns up solid results. And I can even set up the app to run for a certain amount of time before closing, to be used for incentives, or a late evening treat before bed.

Setting YouTube for Kids' timer for 30 minutes

At the risk of my once more vibrant blog to be turned into a daddy blog, the quick summary is that this app is a welcome addition to our tablets and phones. Netflix's Kids only channel is smart. YouTube Kids is smart. The next generation is growing up with smart devices everywhere. What they do with them is largely prodded by what we make possible. Thanks YouTube!

Disclosures: I work for Google, and YouTube is a Google subsidiary.

What If We Redid the 2000 .Com Monopoly Edition for Today's Web?

In the year 2000, as the .com bubble was at its peak, it seemed new tech names were going to rapidly eclipse the old guard. Emails and downloads were new conversation topics, and if you weren’t still on AOL, debates would ensue over which ISP you should choose, or which search engine or portal was the best. Sun was the dot in .com and Linux seemed poised to take over the desktop. Obviously, not everything turned out that way, even if some of the names are still around, and even strong.

The 2000 .Com Monopoly Board

One of the fun collectibles that came out of this time was a .com edition of Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. Instead of properties around Atlantic City streets, you had websites. Community Chest and Chance were replaced with Email and Download cards. And you couldn’t buy property for a few hundred bucks, as everything was in the millions of dollars. Not too soon after the game came out (and of course, I still have it), the .com market was decimated, as the companies of the future weren’t built for the present. Now the game board itself looks like a relic of a short-lived era gone by.

The 2000 List of Companies and Categories

As something of a lark, and thought exercise, let’s consider who would take these 2000 era companies’ spots on the board. I’ll go first with my take on today’s cast of characters.

Dark Purple

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Sportsline.com and FoxSports

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Deadspin and ESPN.com

Commentary: Back in 2000, ESPN, as part of Disney, didn’t have a great approach at owning its web presence. It was part of the Go.com family, one reason it missed the original .com board. Now, ESPN represents sports on all media. Deadspin is an exceptional alternative with sharp commentary that is a must read for serious sports fans. (Apologies to SB Nation)

Light Blue

2000 .com Monopoly edition: GeoCities, Oxygen and iVillage

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Pinterest, SnapChat, and WhatsApp

Commentary: The 2000 edition definitely had a bent toward community. With iVillage and Oxygen, two of the three properties were focused on women. GeoCities didn’t age well and was retired. Pinterest, SnapChat and WhatsApp have become some of the fastest growing communities for pretty much all ages and both genders.

Light Purple

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Shockwave.com, Games.com and E! Online

2014 .com Monopoly edition: TMZ, Buzzfeed and Reddit

Commentary: Shockwave? Really. Let’s move on. For fun entertainment and burning hours of Web surfing, TMZ, Buzzfeed and Reddit can’t be beat. Reddit is a tough one to categorize, as it calls itself the Web’s front page, but it’s knocked off Digg, Slashdot and others for that title.

Orange

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Priceline, Expedia and eBay

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Square, PayPal and Yelp

Commentary: eBay could easily be a repeat in 2000 and 2014. Priceline and Expedia are still doing fine. But Square and PayPal are how the Web does business these days, while Yelp is often the place to go for recommendations on what to buy or where to go.

Red

2000 .com Monopoly edition: The Weather Channel, About.com and CNET

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Dropbox, Instagram and Tumblr

Commentary: About.com looks like a content farm, and while CNET’s still alive and kicking, there’s been nothing to talk about since its CBS acquisition. The Weather Channel? Please. There’s an app for that. And more than just finding content sites, anybody can create and share content globally with apps like Instagram, sites like Tumblr and share it on Dropbox. (Apologies to WordPress, Box and others)

Yellow

2000 .com Monopoly edition: eTrade, Monster.com and Marketwatch

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Twitter

Commentary: Monster.com and eTrade were monsters in 2000. I still use eTrade regularly, but they’re not known for their monkey-centric Super Bowl ads any more. Marketwatch is a snooze. Now, people get their financial and business data from each other via LinkedIn, in real time on Twitter, and check its veracity on Wikipedia. (Apologies to Seeking Alpha and StockTwits).

Green

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista and Lycos

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Microsoft, Amazon and Apple

Commentary: In 2000, Search engines took the entire final row of the Monopoly board. But the positions of Alta Vista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves weren’t strong against innovators that got stronger in the next decade. Now, diverse infrastructure plays like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple (for many reasons each) occupy this highly valuable section of the board.

Dark Blue

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Excite@Home and Yahoo!

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Google and Facebook

Commentary: That Yahoo! was the Boardwalk of 2000 is telling. Excite@Home was a $6.7 billion megamerger in 1999, but by 2001 was pretty much in steep decline. Without intending too much bias toward my current employer, Google and Facebook are the 1-2 when it comes to the Web today, from the top destinations to hours spent, tools deployed, etc - and both play a role in discovery for everyone.

Railroads/Stations

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Nokia, MCI Worldcom, Sprint and AT&T

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Verizon, Comcast, Netflix and YouTube

Commentary: Worldcom? Whoops. Nokia? Whoops. Things change, and companies don’t always adapt quickly. The megalopoly of AT&T is now most like Comcast’s ISP/cable monolith, and Verizon (including their FIOS offering) is the big carrier to be dealt with. Fighting the good fight, and using a ton of bandwidth in the process are Netflix and YouTube, which are essential media mediums on every device.

Utilities

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Linux and Sun Microsystems

2014 .com Monopoly edition: WiFi and Cloud

Commentary: We’re still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop, and Sun is now somewhere in Oracle’s beautiful campus. But while you could take a stab at a language or a platform, like Python, Ruby on Rails, or even PHP, generically its best said that the storing of data and access to that data are the true utilities of 2014. Pervasive WiFi (or 3G/4G) and Cloud power every app and every site.

Summary: The Web is dramatically larger, and more global, now than it was less than two decades ago. This admittedly English-first version of the .com Monopoly for 2014 misses out on the international communities like Baidu, AliBaba and others. There’s no place for the Uber and Lyft rivalry, and while Tumblr was included, it’s hard to put Yahoo! on the board, which probably isn’t 100% fair. I wanted to find a spot for Spotify and Hulu, but failed. I’d be ecstatic to see if Parker Brothers was up for another run at the web centric board, and you know I’d buy it.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which is a customer, partner and competitor with many of the names on this board. Putting them on a Monopoly board is not an opening for the company (or any other on the board) being a monopoly joke.

If Content is Portable, Where You Consume It Doesn't Matter

My good friend and colleague +Adam Singer lit a thought bubble with his latest rant against the dumb pipe of television, saying the formulaic, reality show centric content there is no longer palatable to generations growing up with many more choices - dominated by the on demand, everything's available alternative of the Internet. The summary, he says... is that who actually watches TV is "the old", backed by data from the Washington Post echoing the same.

The argument that the Internet is supplanting TV is one that can't be denied outright, but I believe it's the wrong discussion. What's happening is that the consumers wield incredible power in terms of deciding what they want to watch, when they want to watch it, and where they want to consume it - thanks to dramatic developments in on demand libraries like Netflix, YouTube and others, content destinations, including the smartphone, tablet, and PC, in addition to the TV, and, yes, the humble DVR, which extended the first volley from the VCR (remember those?) and timeshifted our entertainment to take place whenever we wanted it, not when it first aired.

I agree 100% with Adam that a good chunk of the content that fills TV's many channels is low quality stuff that has no redeeming educational value. Then again, the same could be said for much of the Internet and the many social networks we all participate in. Humans love turning their minds off and being entertained. I prefer to not watch reality shows and soap operas, but I do watch TV for live events, and have a list of serial dramas that I watch with my wife - in addition to late night fare like The Daily Show and Conan O'Brien.

One taking a pro-Internet vs TV stance could say, wait. You can watch The Daily Show or Conan online after they air, just like you watch them on your DVR. Sure. You could also, assuming Major League Baseball lets you, watch streaming games live on your tablet through their app. And you can now watch many of those comedies or dramas the same day or later through various network-led outlets online, or on Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, iTunes or some other place.

And at that point, I think the conversation changes. If you're watching The Daily Show online instead of on TV, you've just changed the destination screen, but are still watching the same content. If you're watching a movie on your tablet instead of on your TV, again, you're watching the same content - and the content producers are still bringing you value, whether you're watching on a 5 inch screen or a 50 inch screen.

As an individual, what I've observed in the last decade or so is that as traditional network television has taken fewer risks with their content, and tapped into a soft pudding of reality shows and 24 hour gab events, the premium cable networks are the ones that have delivered an overwhelming amount of perceived high quality content. From Breaking Bad to Dexter, Homeland, The Killing, Ray Donovan, and others, I'm spending a lot more time watching content on AMC, HBO and Showtime than I do on the stalwarts of ABC, CBS and NBC. And I'm paying them money for the privilege.

The success of shows like Breaking Bad on AMC has seemed to lead quickly to top-notch shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black skipping the TV route altogether and debuting on Netflix. Netflix marries the quality of premium channels with Internet delivery and on demand, which the new generation likes - leading to binge watching instead of scheduled consumption.

But my enjoying those shows instead of reality tripe on network TV doesn't mean the Internet has won. After all, if House of Cards were to be the exact same, only on CBS, I'd still watch it. When I'm making a decision on what to watch, I'm not selecting the show due to any loyalty to a network, a medium or a device. I'm watching it because I want to be informed or entertained. If the only way I can get live sporting events is on my television, that's where I will go. If the only way I can get House of Cards is on Netflix, that's where I will go.

I never bet against the Internet. I have long been a huge advocate of migrating from analog to digital, and bringing content on demand - all of it - to be available any time anywhere. But it's not a contest to consume on one screen instead of another - even if it makes me seem like an old fuddy duddy.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which loves the Internet, and owns YouTube.

Now Commerce: Trying to Solve Demand for Instant Gratification

Over the last two decades, the world of retail has transformed from one led by big box retailers who courted shoppers through coupons and print advertorials or splashy television ads, to one where online commerce takes an increasing share of information gathering and eventually, purchasing behavior. Names like Blockbuster and Circuit City will soon be as quaint as Woolworth, Mervyn's and Gemco - symbolizing a generation of stores that didn't adapt quickly enough to take on more nimble competition, who won on scale and speed.

With Christmas 2013 now behind us, the headlines are not just of yes, more shoppers flocking online, mixed in with uncertainty over just how many people were impacted by Target's massive card hacking, but of a completely unexpected surge in last minute buying that doomed shipments by UPS and FedEx, the alpha and omega of delivery systems, connecting the virtual world world with the physical world. But it's clear what's happening. As an increasingly connected Internet populace abstracts the physical world of commerce to an online shopfront, so too vanishes the perception of physical limitations - such as distance, time, and weight.

We are progressing toward a world of "now commerce", where we can order it now, and expect the results practically instantly. The end of 2013 shows we're getting closer, but the system's not yet quite ready for the pressure, even if consumers are.

Simply put: Nobody expected everyone to wait until the very last minute to order Christmas gifts, but everyone did. As UPS told BusinessWeek: "We had our peak projections, and the volume has passed our projections." So all the models failed.

Web giants like Amazon and eBay learned over their young existence to do whatever possible to keep their sites up and keep transactions flowing. Slow load times, inaccurate shopping carts and price mismatches can sap users' patience and reduce trust. So they've prepared for massive amounts of scale - leading to Amazon's supporting upward of 426 transactions a second at peak time, without crashing. But it becomes even more challenging to prepare a physical delivery system like UPS or FedEx for scale of 2 to 3 or 10 times expectations, which is where the system broke, and barring big changes, we should expect this again.

2013 Brought Google Shopping Express to the Bay Area

(image /via +Google Shopping Express)

Take a look at two notable bits of news from two big players in 2013 - the first being Google Shopping Express (disclosure: I work at Google) and the second being Jeff Bezos' announcement of shipment by drones. The promise of both? Even faster fulfillment to customers. In Google's case, they've partnered with retailers in the San Francisco Bay Area to ship under the Google Shopping Express brand, and deliver in specified time windows, just like Safeway.com or traditional meal delivery. Amazon's promise is to take its already fast Prime shipping down from a few days to possibly a few hours. Now, instead of wondering what day you could get something, you just have to know which hour.

Four-plus hours from order to delivery at my door.

Like many others this Christmas season, I put e-commerce to the test with a last-minute order - looking to cross some items off my shopping list, having them come at the last possible moment, to avoid discovery and reduce clutter in my home. So with the knowledge that Google Shopping Express had a noon cutoff on Christmas Eve to deliver that day, I placed an order just after 11, and selected a time window for delivery between 1 and 5 pm that afternoon. As you can see from the screenshot in my email, the gifts were delivered just over four hours later, to my door - not only saving me a trip to the store, but providing near instant gratification.

Often, one's vision of the tech future is colored by the Star Trek computer - one which responds to voice commands, and can produce physical objects by request. It's been said Google is obsessed with building the Star Trek computer, and innovation like the world of 3D printing makes this vision of virtual to physical conversion seem more possible. But before we get that, we're already seeing a generation of people who expect things to happen instantly. One can instantly turn on Netflix or iTunes or YouTube and see practically any piece of video ever made. One can turn to Spotify or Google Music and get any song on demand and play it on any device, practically anywhere, assuming you have enough bandwidth. We expect it immediately, and growl if buffering makes it imperfect.

So you can see this coming, can't you? The consumers are expecting instant gratification. We're getting incredible service when it comes to entertainment. We can order practically anything virtually and delivery windows are tightening. We know what we want, and we want it now.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which runs Google Shopping Express and in various ways competes with Amazon. Google also owns YouTube and in various ways competes with Netflix. My house is an Amazon Prime household and our kids watch way too much Netflix.

Video: GDL Root Access: The Intersection of Skill and Luck

In the seven-plus years I've run this blog, one of the more frequent discussions is around how the factors of skill, effort, opportunity and luck intertwine to result in a positive outcome (or not) for companies and individuals. Earlier this month, we talked about how you need to do more than just show up in Silicon Valley to gain traction, and back in 2009, I took on the required intersection of skill and luck, wondering aloud how good employees at unsuccessful ventures differentiate themselves from bad employees at successful places. Unfortunately, no magic.

So fellow Googler +Don Dodge and I talked about this very thing on a +GDL Root Access event last week, making it clear that for every great story of startup success you read about on the Web, there are handfuls more that you might not ever hear about, or close down with a whimper. I've long said that celebrating failure never helped anyone, but we should be aware of it, and learn from it. Tune in to our embedded YouTube discussion below. The debate runs just over seven minutes.

 

Web Data Caps Not Prepared for Pervasive Connectedness

Comcast (Xfinity) made headlines yesterday with its discontinuation of a standard 250 gigabytes a month cap for its residential users, in favor of a new format, which starts at 300 gigabytes a month, with the option to buy more. As a residential customer, I had noticed they stopped tracking our net usage in April, as after continuous growth in our home's Web traffic, the number shockingly (and incorrectly) displayed it was stalled at 56 Gigabytes, following a 162 GB month in March, up about 20 percent from February, and in turn up nearly 40 percent from January.

The main rise in our home for data consumption is two-fold, with my kids' adoption of Netflix and YouTube on our various tablets, and our own use of Google+ hangouts for live video interactions with others on the social network, including extended family and remote friends. As I watched our monthly data consumption increase, it looked like we would be on track to hit Comcast's data cap of 250 Gigabytes somewhere in the second half of the year, barring changes in our behavior or an eventual topping out - and that doesn't include the various megabytes taken down over 3G and 4G from our Android phones and Chromebooks.

Typically, limits imposed on users are indicative of one of two matters - the first being a lack of robustness in the system, which has proven incapable of supporting a change in customer usage, and the second being bad actors within the system, who for whatever reason, consume a dramatically greater amount than the average customer. It's easy to point at illicit file sharing, pornography or piracy as the reason for these caps, but with increased use of cloud computing, high quality video consumption and web communication, including VoIP and video chat, what used to be the exception is threatening to become the new normal. The wonder is if the infrastructure can adapt to consumer needs, or if even more disruption is needed.

The face to face to face video chats of today and near instantaneous downloads of feature films that we take for granted, even in HD, seemed improbable five years ago and impossible 15 years ago. One has to wonder what could be made possible in the next five to 15 years going forward, with advancements in software codecs, fibre outlay and wireless standards. My kids are growing up in a world when they expect any TV show to be accessible on any device whenever they want it, and it's unlikely they'll ever understand the sounds of a dial-up modem, let alone references to floppy disks, analog address books and rotary phones.

Traditional infrastructure providers like Comcast and others who find themselves making incremental changes in a world that seems ripe for significant change and disruption make me feel like they are solving for today's problems without preparing for big changes that are on the way. Even their newest proposal, to start allocations only 20% ahead of previous limits, with warnings to those who hit these new limits, seem short-sighted. The answer, for me, is to prepare for a world with 10 times the bandwidth we have now, when not only every show ever is available to any device at any time, but possibly anything at any quality, anywhere.

If my kids and I, in our casual use, can start to bump up against caps designed to slow down illegal use, just imagine the damage we could do to these artificial caps with a more round the clock schedule and even more devices. Even my thermostat and my scale are connected to the web now. It's time we stopped playing with small percentages and started getting ready for a real Internet of things, or... scratch that... an Internet of every thing.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which is working on Google Fiber in Kansas City, and provides products like Google+ hangouts, YouTube, Android, and Chromebooks, and could be considered a competitor or partner to Comcast and Netlfix.

Daria Musk Visits Google+ for Live Performance

Last Monday, I had the great pleasure of meeting +Daria Musk and interviewing her on stage, to learn more about her story and rise from relative obscurity to becoming a Google+ sensation. As I told the Google+ team, assembled in the private concert, in my introduction, Daria epitomizes the community here as well as anyone I know.

She is fully invested in this platform, is tireless, upbeat, and to boot, is incredibly talented. I'd heard her sing in many a hangout, but to hear her sing live at Google was transformative. Nothing beats a live performance by an artist with passion, energy and skill. With pleasure, I share with you our conversation with +Daria Musk.




/via My Google+ Profile.

Web Video's Challenge of Inventory, Portability

 

Last month, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings set off a tech media firestorm with the announcement of a split between the company's streaming business, which would bear the original Netflix name, and its DVD by mail business, now known as Qwikster. Much of the discussion centered around two parts - the first being Netflix's price increases announced this summer, and the second, focus on the name of the new business, which sounded way too much like Amway's sub-brand, Quixtar. But both flareups circumvented the real trajectory of Netflix making a choice to decrease its attention on the physical media world, one I publicly said I walked away from this Spring. With a smart combination of online video properties, including Netflix, YouTube, iTunes and Hulu, you can have your entertainment needs satiated practically any time. However, there remain gaps of content and availability from site to site, thanks to exclusivity deals with entertainment owners, copyright and who knows what else.

Apple's initial foray into renting movies (and later television shows) online, combined with the release of Apple TV units, made it easy for me and my family to select movies on demand, and watch them almost instantly. After some buffering, the selected title would be in our living room and could play that evening. Back in 2007, when Netflix was not streaming, the opportunity was available, in my opinion, for Apple to seize the market, through introducing a subscription service. (See: How Apple Could Crush Netflix Now) But it didn't happen. Apple didn't go the subscription route, Netflix evolved, and no doubt Hollywood studios were afraid of Steve Jobs having as much power over their titles' success as he did in the music business. In time, Netflix figured out streaming, kept the subscription model intact, and presented another choice for online video. Even better, Netflix did something that Apple chose not to do - embracing the Web by allowing for in-browser movie plays, and releasing mobile apps for practically every phone and tablet. (See: Netflix Edges Closer to Making the Perfect Web Video Site)

While Apple did a great job of bringing films and TV into my living room or laptop, Netflix did a better job of making them portable. In addition to box office wins, I've seen full seasons of shows like Dexter and Mad Men through Netflix, available on any laptop and through most connected TV devices, such as Google TV, TiVo and the Nintendo Wii. Netflix gets the Web, and is so simple to use that my 3 year old twins spend a lot of time running the Netflix app on our iPads. I'm often amused to see the recommendations that come my way from Netflix after Matthew or Sarah have spent an hour with Nickelodeon and Sprout shows for toddlers.

Similarly, YouTube's tie-in with the Android Market has also embraced the cloud for streaming video. As I wrote in June, you can rent films on the Android Market, and watch them on YouTube from any computer. That too is very convenient, and there's no entrance fee requiring subscription. Meanwhile, Hulu has access to some shows (like my personal favorite, Peep Show) that you can't get anywhere else - and there's the catch. Much like in the old days of instant messaging, where services were splintered without standards for interoperability, consumers are left to have multiple accounts from multiple places and remember which shows and titles are where. An evening's entertainment can come down to which device you have in which room, which services are supported and which titles are available for which place. It's easier to deal with for the cloud-backed properties, like Netflix and YouTube, but less great for the others. Nobody's yet got it 100% nailed.

Additionally, what all of these services miss is the opportunity to satisfy the home viewer who wants to see movies currently playing in theaters. I've been begging for this for more than three years now. (See: Think Apple Would Dare To Take On the Movie Theaters?) As a parent of three kids three and under, planning for a babysitter to cover the hours when my wife and I would attend a movie is a challenge, one that will no doubt cost much more than the face value of the tickets. So most of the time, the theater experience is unavailable. Meanwhile, most families' home theater systems are getting even better. I would have to bet the availability of in-theater titles to play at home would have real value and I know I would pay a premium for it. I would have seen Moneyball this weekend, if it was available, but being homebound means either we have to wait, or we have to seek out illegal downloading alternatives - which aren't ever a good option.

Spotify delivered the reality of a near-infinite music library on demand. Practically any title in the world (or so it seems) in high quality with no downloads or delays. The movie equivalent is still missing. No doubt this is a harder quest, but it's one worth conquering. Any time you see knowledgeable people debating Netflix's streaming movie inventory online, you hear concerns about its library. The company is closing deals to make that better, but they're quite expensive. Apple hasn't budged on a subscription model. YouTube remains best known for amateur videos, while that's expected to improve. And who knows what's happening with Hulu? Not me.

As broadband becomes more ubiquitous, and traditional entertainment leaders get innovative on their own about reaching customers, partnering with all services, I expect the portable cloud model to win, as it always does. Things are much better now than they were two or three years ago, but there's much more room to go. I hope in two or three more years in the future, we'll be laughing about how hard it was to get the titles we wanted anywhere.

Disclosures: I work at Google, of course, and you can decide if that impacts how I discuss Google TV, Android, YouTube or any of Google's perceived partners or competitors. :)

YouTube, Reader's UX Maven Jenna Bilotta Highlighted

The Citizen, the local paper in Fayetteville, Georgia, offers a fantastic profile of one of the sharpest UX designers I've ever met.+Jenna Bilotta , who is the brains behind Cosmic Panda, the latest YouTube design experiment, previously flexed her creative power on Google Reader, where I've spent more hours over the last four years than practically any other place. Great to see someone without a CxO or VP title getting some well-deserved recognition.

Congrats, Jenna!

FCHS grad keeping your eyes on YouTube | The Citizen

/via My Google+ Profile.

My Top Ten Favorite Google Products (2011)

Google makes a ton of products. Almost two years ago, thinking about it, I posted my top ten Google products at the time. Google Reader was #1, Blogger was #2 and FeedBurner was #3. Since then, G+ has come into play, I switched to Android and Chrome is on fire. It's time for a rewrite.

The Original Post from Sept. 2009: My Top Ten Favorite Google Products

Here's what I would list now. Eager to hear your own top 3, 5, or even 10.

1. Google+ (Obviously, this is my start page, I am here constantly)
2. Android (The mobile OS runs my favorite tablets and phones)
3. Google ChromeOS (Living in the cloud is a game changer)
4. Blogger (The easiest, most flexible and stable blogging platform)
5. Google Reader (Still the best place to follow hundreds of sites in one place)
6. Google Search (The gold standard for finding anything)
7. Gmail (Finally my default email, and archive. Buzz is a plus.)
8. FeedBurner (Takes my blog to the rest of the Web, powered by Pubsubhubbub)
9. Google Voice (Syncs my phone to the Web with auto-blocking of spam calls)
10. YouTube (If it happened and is worth watching, it's here. Now with movies too!)

Things have obviously changed in just two years. Android, ChromeOS, Google Voice and Google+ were not on my radar much only a short time ago, and now they're essential. Curious to your own insight and what major services (Analytics, Maps, Earth, etc.) I missed.

/via my Google+ Profile.

Record Labels Yank Videos from Youtify Over Syndication

Saturday night, I introduced the service Youtify, a neat service which helps find top music videos and playlists from YouTube, and organizes them in a browser app that looks much like iTunes. Though I published late on a weekend, the story was quickly distributed, especially on Twitter, with nearly 150 shares of the story. But the fast rise to visibility has hit a wall for the service, thanks to problems that started late Tuesday night, when almost all the top videos from YouTube simply stopped playing.

It turns out the rights owners for the music videos themselves, primarily record labels, put a stop to their content being played on the site, with Youtify specifically being blocked.

Per Thulin, one of the cofounders of the project, along with Karl Tannergard, initially thought he had somehow run afoul of YouTube's API rules, as users found the video player was rendered almost completely useless. But after reaching YouTube, they confirmed it was the record labels, and not they, who had stopped access.

Youtify Ground to a Halt Thanks to Record Labels' Intervention

That the record labels aren't immediately excited about yet another cool and innovative way to showcase their artists' content is no surprise. They've been late to the game and backward in practically every opportunity over the last 20 years. As Thulin wrote me in an email, the action caught them by surprise, especially as nobody made any attempt to contact Youtify directly.

Youtify's Playlists Show Holes Thanks to Rights Management

"Our new plan is to embrace and reward the artists and labels still allowing us to play their videos," he wrote. "We will let those artists and labels put ads in our application for free, and also let our community help spread these videos, generate good ratings, viewcounts, shout-outs on Twitter, etc. We hope that our growing community will generate enough noise for them to reconsider!"

Other Songs Not Impacted Play As They Always Have

Unless the record labels change their mind, the most likely culprit being VEVO, who owns a large portion of the videos that aren't working, Youtify, for the time being, is somewhat hobbled. A small fraction of the Top 100 songs play, while amateur content from "Best of YouTube" still runs as will many searched for playlists that don't intersect by the resistant labels.

The concept for Youtify is great. Even the user interface got a revamp in the last few days following the initial post. But the content is what it's all about, and if they are starved for content, users will probably not be made loyal. The question is will the labels let this one go, or will they remain obtuse?

Youtify Turns YouTube Into Your Music Video Jukebox

YouTube is much more than a repository for amateur videos and bloopers. The video giant is the second largest search engine for the Web, a practically endless treasure trove for TV clips of all types, and unsurprisingly, heaven for music video promoters and fans. A cool site called Youtify (YouTube + Spotify, get it?) launched this month to tap this resource, letting you build your own playlists, search for your own music, and pretty much make the Web your jukebox. Even if you don't want to watch the videos, the music alone is great.

Available both as a stand-alone Web app (at www.youtify.com) as well as a Chrome browser app, Youtify transforms your Web browser into something looking much like the iTunes music player, prepopulated with two playlists: "Top 100", showing the usual popular fare from artists like Beyoncé, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, and "Best of YouTube", which highlights fan-submitted music (like Super Mario beatbox and ukulele the beatles - obladi oblada).

Searching Youtify for Underworld Turns Up Scads of Videos

Every link plays the music video in the bottom left corner of your browser (like iTunes does in its music player) and has the option to expand to your full screen. You can also right-click and go to the YouTube video directly.

The Top 100 Youtify Videos Are Names You Would Recognize

While that's fun, what's even better is when you search for your favorite music. Even a techno geek like me could pick up hundreds of tracks (well, music videos) from bands like Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Daft Punk. If a band has ever made a music video worth playing, it's on YouTube. You can create and save playlists, and search playlists across the network. The great part of that is instead of recreating the playlists for each artist, it's possible they already exist somewhere. Searching an artist name can turn up dozens of playlists, each with dozens of videos already there.

Building and Playing a Youtify Playlist

With MTV getting way the heck away from its initial mission, YouTube has taken over as the premiere venue for music videos on the Web, and possibly, all media. Youtify makes finding those videos and the music behind them fun. While it's not going to replace your music library app (be it Spotify, iTunes, Google Music or something else), you'll definitely want to check this out. Just don't plan on being extremely efficient at the office while doing so. Find it at http://www.youtify.com.

Kicklight Labs Debuts Tout: Life's Mini Video Moments

There's a new video platform in town, and for social media veterans who remember 12seconds.tv, it might make you think you're having flashbacks. But it's not 2008 all over again, and there's another service looking to capture life's moments with short video clips just over 10 seconds long. The new player is called Tout, looking to enable short conversations with video, with tight integration to social networks Twitter and Facebook and hashtags to help users find similar moments. Like all good social networks, you can follow your friends, but you can follow these tags as well. As more people discover and start recording their moments, you can track the world's updates, not in 140 characters of text, but with words, video and sound.

The service is the offspring of Kicktag, formerly known as Kicklight Labs, and the company's CEO, Michael Downing, was president at Kicktag, who raised $2 million at the end of 2010. Kicktag emerged from Bay Area think tank and research gold mine, SRI International. A few pivots later, we have Tout, and early users are tapping into the service to share brief moments from their life, be it reports from the Founders' Den in San Francisco, rocking out with friends, or casual home scenes involving pets.


   Posting from Tout via iPhone With Hashtags

You can get video on Tout in two ways. The most direct way is to download the Tout app, available on iOS now, with Android promised very soon, and record a short video, then post it to your stream, with appropriate hashtags. A second way, also interesting, is to find a YouTube video and select an excerpt of up to 15 seconds long to post to the site. In the latter case, the video is not actually transferred to Tout's servers, but remains on YouTube, starting and ending where you had specified.

My Tout Channel, Featuring My Kids

The social Web is no doubt gun shy over short video services with the demise of 12seconds and Seesmic's forced move out of the world of video before they became a social media update client. But with iPhones, iPod Touches and Android phones all having fast access to video recording these days, and social networking being even more pervasive, it's possible that Tout has a good chance to meet the intersection of these trends. Tout of course also makes a big deal of the ease of updating your Facebook and Twitter accounts with new Tout moments, as noted in their first pieces of coverage on The Huffington Post and StreamingMedia.com.

Unsurprisingly, my first Tout moments feature my kids, who are much cuter than I am, even in short clips. (See: Braden laughs and thinks I am hilarious. for one example) You can get started on Tout to add your own moments at http://www.tout.com.

Google Profiles Upgrades, PM Klau Heads to YouTube

Nearly a year after former Blogger product manager Rick Klau took on the important, if not glamorous, role of heading Google Profiles, the product of his efforts debuted today, letting users make their profiles much more personal than before, with greater customization, improved layout and photo options, presenting an alternative to the Facebook profile or AOL's About.me, for the open Web. The new profiles put the users in control, are more fun, and keep Google Buzz front and center.

Interestingly, as the new profiles debut (mine's here), Rick has simultaneously announced he is moving elsewhere within Google, to act as a new product manager at YouTube, where he's responsible for the video service's home page and social strategy. I know Rick well and consider him a friend, so I hope we see more launches out of YouTube with his fingerprints on it that just might take less than 11 months.

My New Google Profile With a Scrapbook, Info and Introduction

In April of last year, following Rick's move, I suggested ten ideas to redesign the profile and postulated the tie-in with Profiles and Buzz would help the company compete more directly with Facebook. That Buzz remains a center of the new Profiles shows the company may continue this hope, despite some skepticism from the greater tech Web, and as I count down those items I suggested versus what was delivered, it's clear there is still more work to do, which Rick hints at on his blog, where he says there's "a lot more to come in the weeks and months ahead."

The Buzz Tab Remains Key to Google Profiles

Without speculating on the future of Buzz or Google's greater social strategy, the addition of the new Profiles is absolutely welcome. You can see the new profiles bear a profiles.google.com subdomain, while for now at least, the old ones remain at the google.com/profiles subdirectory. (New vs. Old)

Having learned from the Buzz privacy flareups last Spring, sensitive data on the Profile is only shared at your behest, so you can share as much or as little about yourself online as you like. So go check out your new profile, upload some great pics, and take ownership of the way Google presents you.