YouTube Tests Video Downloads

Yes, you can download YouTube videos using hundreds of sites, scripts, extensions and applications and that's because YouTube's interface didn't offer a download option. Initially, the only format available for download was FLV, which was only intended to be played using Adobe Flash. Then YouTube started to test higher-quality versions for videos, including MP4 (H264 with AAC audio). Now you can export all YouTube videos as MP4 and it would be trivial for YouTube to add this option, which is already available at Google Video.

YouTube's terms of use still insist that the videos can only be accessed for streaming, "a contemporaneous digital transmission of an audiovisual work via the Internet from the YouTube Service to a user's device in such a manner that the data is intended for real-time viewing and not intended to be copied, stored, permanently downloaded, or redistributed by the user".

But things are starting to change: the videos from Barrack Obama's YouTube channel ChangeDotGov have a small download link below the player. "YouTube is rolling this out slowly, initially with content that aspires to be consistent with principles of open government. I'm told it will be offered more generally. In any case, it is an important development. There have always been hacks for slurping down YouTube videos. But it is a valuable step that YouTube encourages and supports this sharing," notes Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University.

Why would you download videos? To be able to watch them without having an Internet connection, to download them faster using download accelerators like Flashget or Free Download Manager, to use some of the content in your videos or to have an offline version just in case the video is no longer available at YouTube.

Upcoming Gmail Features: Contact Deduplicator, Better Video Chat

Gmail's Product Manager Todd Jackson told CNet some of the Gmail features that will be released in the next months, but hopefully the best new things are still secret.

The video chat plug-in for Gmail will show higher-quality videos and this is one of the reasons why Google chose not to use Flash. "Jackson says the plug-in route will be able to provide even higher-quality video as people's connections improve, going to Video Graphics Array (640x480 pixels) all the way up to high definition."

Gmail's contact manager will add a feature that's even in Hotmail, not to mention some business-oriented mail clients: removing duplicates. "Jackson says a de-duper is on the way and that contacts will have more of a presence both in your inbox and in conversations."

Regarding email attachments, CNet suggests that Gmail could increase the already generous limit of 20 MB, but Gmail's Product Manager hints at something else. "We know people's file sizes are getting bigger. They want to share their files, keep them in the cloud, and not worry about which computer they're on. Google wants to be solving these problems."

Will Google release a more comprehensive solution for storing and sharing files, now that Gmail's storage quote increases much slower, small projects like Google Notebook enter hibernation and Gmail starts to limit the way you use free products like Google Apps Standard Edition?

Share Personal Information with Your Gmail Contacts

Google Profiles has a new feature that lets you share information about yourself with your contacts. "This information is not public.You control who sees it. Once you've entered your contact information here, you can share it with your friends and family, so they always have the most up-to-date information."

You can add your email addresses, phone numbers, and home address, and allow all your contacts or specific contact groups, like Friends or Family, to see this information on your profile. For some reason, Google doesn't prefill some of the fields like the email address or your Google Talk ID and you can't share the data with contacts that are not part of a group.


It's not clear if the shared data will be used in Gmail, but Microsoft offers a similar feature called Windows Live People that's integrated with Hotmail. "Windows Live People allows real-time updates to contact's information. Suppose one of the user's contacts just moved and has a new home address. When that contact enters their new information in Windows Live People, the user's contact list across Windows Live services is automatically updated in real time."

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Google Closes Many Services

Google decided to close many services that were either redundant, not very successful or unrelated to Google's core business.

After Google acquired YouTube, Google Video morphed into a video search engine, but you could still upload videos. Unlike YouTube, Google Video didn't have a limitation for the duration of a video. "In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. Don't worry, we're not removing any content hosted on Google Video -- this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service," mentions Google Video Blog.


Google Notebook, one of the best Google services, is also about to be discontinued. "Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we'll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don't fret, we'll continue to maintain service for those of you who've already signed up." After launching SearchWiki, Google Search removed the integration with Google Notebook and the integration with Google Bookmarks turned out to be a bad idea. The project was probably discontinued because it couldn't become a part of a more significant service, but it's disappointing to close a project that gained a lot of visibility and could become a clipboard for many Google services.



Other services that will be discontinued include Google Catalogs, a database of mail-order product catalogs last updated in 2006, Dodgeball, a mobile social network acquired by Google in 2005 that stagnated after its founders left Google, and Mashup Editor, a project that will be replaced by the more powerful Google App Engine.



Jaiku, the microblogging service acquired by Google, will migrate to Google App Engine and will no longer be actively developed. "As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers. With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we're excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform."


"Google engineers have long been at the top of the heap when it comes to the Google pecking order. Now, neither products nor engineers seem to have a protected status, as Google goes into the grim economic times predicted for 2009," writes Danny Sullivan. Google closed 3 new offices, slowed down hiring and no longer encourages wild experiments.

"Matt [Cutts] insisted that the early spirit of freedom and experimentation was still there in the culture. But when I pressed him on whether even Google could afford that luxury in harder times, he admitted that people like him now had perhaps to be a little more focussed on the bottom line. But he said the one day in five spent on personal projects was not being discarded," reported BBC News.

{ via SEL. Thank you, Kevin. }

Google Shared Storage

In 2007 Google added an option to pay for additional storage for Gmail and Picasa Web. The prices have changed since then: for $20/year you get 10 GB instead of 6 GB, for $75/year you get 40 GB from 25 GB, for $250/year you get 150 GB instead of 100 GB and $500/year is the price for 400 GB, up from 250 GB.

Google's offer doesn't look very good if you compare it with the storage offered by Yahoo Mail and Flickr. Yahoo Mail promises to offer "unlimited storage" if you don't abuse the system. "The purpose of unlimited mail isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by our anti-abuse measures."

Flickr is less generous: you can only upload 100 MB of photos each month if you have a free account. Picasa Web Albums offers 1 GB of storage for free, but a Flickr Pro account costs $25/year and you get "unlimited storage".

Google's offer would make sense if you could use the storage in a service like GDrive, but uploading photos and storing more attachments in Gmail is not enough. There's no defined limit for uploading videos at Google Video, but you need to pay if you want more than 1 GB of storage at Picasa Web Albums.

Google offers a way to purchase more storage space to use with some of its products (currently Gmail and Picasa Web Albums). This extra storage acts as overflow when you run out of free storage space in either product. If you've filled your free storage (5 7.2 GB and counting for Gmail or 1 GB for Picasa Web Albums), you'll automatically use your purchased space to store more pictures and messages up to your new storage limit.

Your shared storage space will be used by whatever product needs it. Picasa's free storage is for photos only, and Gmail's is just for Gmail messages, but the shared storage can be all photos, all messages, or a mix of both. You can't set aside shared storage space for one product - it will be used by any product that's over its free storage quota on a first-come, first-served basis.

Transit Layer in Google Maps

Google Maps already shows information about public transportation when you get directions, but now you can see more transit data in a new layer. To enable the layer, click on "More..." and select "Transit" if the option is available.

Google Maps blog lists the cities where the new layer has been enabled and some of them aren't covered by Google Transit yet. "Whereas the main Google Transit product has the goal to provide full schedule information and routing, the objective of the Transit Layer is to overlay lines visually on Google Maps. Think of a virtual metro map on top of Google Maps -- even when we don't have itinerary planning available, we want you to be able to see public transit options that are available."

Here's the full list of cities where you can see the transit layer: Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brasilia, Cairo, Capetown, Caracas, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dallas, Dortmund, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Ekaterinburg, Essen, Frankfurt, Genoa, Guadalajara, Hamburg, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kazan, Köln, Lille, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Madrid, Marseille, Medellin, Mexico City, Melbourne, Monterrey, Montreal, Munich, Naples, Nizhniy Novgorod, Oslo, Paris, Perth, Portland, Porto, Porto Alegre, Prague, Pretoria, Recife, Rennes, Rio de Janeiro, Samara, San Francisco, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Tunis, Vienna, Warsaw.

Send and Archive: a Multi-Action Gmail Button

You receive a message in Gmail's inbox and after sending a reply, Gmail shows your conversation and a list of options: "back to Inbox", "Archive", "Report spam", "Delete", "Older" and more actions. Most of them don't make any sense in this specific context, but they're kept for consistency. You'll probably go back to the inbox and read the next message, but if you like to have a clean inbox you'll also archive the message you've just replied to.

A new feature available in Gmail Labs lets you automatically archive a message after sending a reply. The default button becomes "Send & Archive" and it will perform the following actions:

* send the message
* archive the conversation
* go back to inbox



"More often than not, as I reply to a message I also want to archive it so I can enjoy the satisfaction of a pristine inbox. Having clicked "Send" followed by "Archive" a few million times, I started to wish there was a way to just click once and accomplish both actions at the same time," explains Pal Takacsi, who added the small new feature.

Another multi-action button that would make many people happy could combine labeling conversations and archiving them. What other smart buttons would you like to see?

Google Quick Search Box for Mac

Last year, Google released a mobile app for iPhone that lets you search many data sources from a single location: web pages, local businesses, contacts. A similar application is now available for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and it's called Quick Search Box.

Nicholas Jitkoff, Quicksilver's creator, is one of the developers. The application is a powerful box that works as a program launcher, address bar, Google search box, desktop search box, calculator and weather gadget. The source code includes modules that integrate data from Google services like Google Bookmarks, Gmail and Picasa Web, so the application has the potential to become the central point for accessing Google.

"For the last year, we have been working on a new, open-source quick search box. Today, we are releasing our first developer preview for the Mac. This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come," explains Google.

{ Licensed as CC-Noncommercial by phnk. }

Quick Search Box is also a feature of Google Desktop, but it's unfortunate that Google didn't integrate more data sources. My favorite Windows Vista feature is the ubiquitous search box. Some interesting alternatives are Launchy, an extensible application launcher for Windows and Linux, and Mozilla Ubiquity, an experimental project that makes web applications more useful. All of them are powerful command-lines that expose information from your computer or the web.

Gmail Is Different. Here's What You Need to Know

Most people find Gmail confusing because they don't understand basic features like labels, archiving, filters. So you'll hear them asking for folders or wondering how to remove messages from the inbox.

This knol written by gravi_t, an active member of the Gmail group, does a good job at explaining the features that make Gmail different.

Imagine this:

- each email is a piece of paper
- labels are post-it notes, sticky notes
- there are default labels, like "Inbox", "Sent items", "Trash" ("Bin"), "Spam"
- you can also create labels (i.e. sticky notes)

This means that - unlike in other email services - you do not put the emails into folders. You actually attach labels to the emails.

Only one copy of your emails:

- you only just have ONE existing copy of your emails
- no matter how many labels (post-its) you stick on them
- you can attach as many labels to this one copy as you want, just as you can stick a lot of post-it notes to the same one piece of paper

This is why your email disappears from everywhere when you delete it; because deleting the email means deleting the "piece of paper"!!

The knol is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial and Google should use some of its content in the "welcome" message.


Tip: To find when you created a Gmail account, go to "All mail", click on "Oldest" and you'll see the first messages you've received. You'll need this information to get access to a compromised Gmail account.

{ Thanks, Anonymous. }