Not one of the 850 million? Mark Zuckerberg will keep hunting you down, as Facebook just launched an ad campaign across Google’s AdSense network. As if there aren’t enough people who waste their lives feeding the advertisers…
Category / Internet
The Poll: How do YOU pronounce GIF?
Vevo redesign shifts away from YouTube towards Facebook
Over the past two years, Vevo has become the default place to watch music online. But, like many other streaming video providers, it had a problem: For users, the act of watching videos tends to be a very disjointed process.
Users search for something they want to watch, find it, watch it and then have to search for something else all over again. Most sites have recommendations when the videos end, but they can be hit or miss — and they tend not to be very personal, not reflective of a user’s viewing history or his social graph.
I’ve written about this a lot in the past — about how the success of streaming video will be driven by improved discovery and through the implementation of a more TV-like playback experience where the user doesn’t have to continually search for the content he wants to watch.
Anyway, the latest update…
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Kony 2012
If you have been anywhere on the internet in the last couple of days, you will have heard of Invisible Children‘s Kony 2012 campaign. If you haven’t, stop reading this. Watch the entire video.
Windows Phone App of the Week: SuperTube
I’m sorry that I haven’t done an app of the week for a while, but I’ve been busy at this thing called school. But sitting here gated to my room on a Saturday night and listening to Garden by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs inspired me to get back to the work that really matters. Without further ado, this week’s app of the week is YouTube Pro.
This fantastic app is better than any of the other YouTube apps that I have personally tried, simply because it is the only one I have tried that allowed you to log in to your YouTube account. Upon opening the app, you are faced with a Metro style start screen, you then slide along the panorama to view things such as the top rated videos and your subscriptions. However most of the interesting stuff is located on the first screen. The ‘Recorded Page’, where you can take and upload videos from within the app is a very useful addition, and this along with the uploading page makes mobile uploading a great deal easier. Also, as you would expect, there are pages for your playlists, your downloads and many other features that have in fact been missing from most other apps that I have used. The actual video playback in this app is good also. Before playing a video, you are taken to a page where you are given a choice of what quality you wish to play it in, the description of the video, and the like and dislike buttons. The only problem that I have with this app is the fact that in order to play low quality video, you need to have the standard YouTube app installed, but after having downloading it I have had no more problems.
YouTube Pro is an excellent app which I recommend to any person both with or without a YouTube account.
YouTube Pro, Windows Phone 7, Free or 79p
Download from the Marketplace
Add-on of the Week: Spool
First off, Spool, an innovative new add-on available on Firefox and Chrome, as well as being an app on iOS and Android. Think Instapaper but for EVERYTHING. Any media: video, text, pictures, all collected at the touch of a button and uploaded to the Spool servers, where you can enjoy them offline, on any supported device ‘in a clear format’. Using an innovative new ‘spoolbot’, all data is captured without the ads. Although the bot sadly has to watch all video before it can be uploaded, it’s still very impressive.
Even better; fretting about whether that video you just spooled was in Flash and so can’t be watched on your iPhone? Don’t! Spool automatically converts everything to HTML5 and so can be enjoyed on any device supported. We hope for a Windows Phone version as well as quicker upload times in the future. Best of all, right now it is in free, private beta. Don’t hesitate, join up now. If your interested, that link will give both you and me a shorter time of being accepted as the more people invited, the quicker the invite.
Much obliged
CS
Horse_ebookmarklet turns the internet into engaging gibberish
You’ve probably heard of the @Horse_ebooks Twitter account. If you haven’t, why not? Unlike other bots on Twitter, @Horse_ebooks sends out cryptic messages that have oddly mesmerised the internet. @Fart says it best:
@Horse_ebooks is a Twitter bot designed and automated by apparently some Russian guy to sell worthless, horrible ebooks about horses. In order to avoid being detected as a spam bot, it occasionally posts a text snippet or two from one of its ebooks, chosen at random. I will never buy an ebook from it, but I will follow this Twitter account until I die or horses become extinct, whichever comes first.
Now, Ben Nyberg has developed a bookmarklet to spread the @Horse_ebooks hilarity all over the internet. When the Javascript is run, every image on a page becomes the trademark horse and all the text becomes delightful gibberish. Nyberg himself expected this to amuse people for about 20 minutes, but all I know is that I am doing it to every site I see. Here are some examples.
So, what are you waiting for? Install the bookmarklet and try it yourself.
Anonymous bring down the CIA site
Anonymous are at it again, and this time the CIA are in the firing line.
Protesting ACTA and TPP
This Saturday, activists worldwide will take to the streets in protest of ACTA. Like SOPA and PIPA, ACTA would criminalize users, encourage internet providers to spy on you, and make it easier for media companies to sue sites out of existence and jail their founders. TPP goes even farther than ACTA, and the process has been even more secretive and corrupt. Last weekend (we wish this was a joke) trade negotiators partied with MPAA (pro-SOPA) lobbyists before secret negotiations in a Hollywood hotel, while public interest groups were barred from meeting in the same building.
Please help the internet by standing up for your rights.
Thank you.
6 Reasons to oppose ACTA
- ACTA locks countries into obsolete copyright and patent laws. If a democracy decides on less restrictive laws that reflect the reality of the internet, ACTA will prevent that.
- ACTA criminalizes users by making noncommercial, harmless remixes into crimes if “on a commercial scale” (art 2.14.1). Many amateur works achieve a commercial scale on sites like YouTube. ACTA, like SOPA, could mean jail time for the Justin Biebers of the world.
- ACTA criminalizes legitimate websites, making them responsible for user behavior by “aiding and abetting”. (art 2.14.4). Like SOPA, the founders of your favorite sites could be sued or (worse) thrown in jail for copyright infringement by their users.
- ACTA will let rightsholders use laughably inflated claims of damages (based on the disproven idea that every download or stream is a lost sale) to sue people. As if suing amazing artists, video makers and websites for millions wasn’t hard enough!
- ACTA Permanently bypasses democracy by giving the “ACTA Committee” the power to “propose amendments to [ACTA]” (art 6.4). In other words, voting for ACTA writes a blank check to an unelected committee. These closed-door proceedings will be a playground for SOPA-supporters like the MPAA.
- Trade agreements are a gaping loophole, a backdoor track that, even though it creates new law, is miles removed from democracy. It’s a secretive process that’s tailor-made to serve politically connected companies. And the movie studios behind SOPA? They’re experts at it. If we can’t make secretive trade agreements harder to pass than US law, our internet’s future belongs to the lobbyists behind SOPA.
МегаФон makes users compete to use the most data
МегаФон is definitely my kind of network…
Digixav 