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New Media News Every Morning

YouTube Turns 5, Exceeds 2 Billion Views Per Day

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May is YouTube’s month. It was on this month when the first beta version of YouTube.com come out into the open. That was five years ago when YouTube was launched with an aim of giving all of us a place to easily upload videos and share them with the world. Did YouTube achieved this? Obviously yes – and with a resounding success. In fact, as YouTube celebrates its five years of existence, the premiere video uploading site has achieved a remarkable feat – 5 billion views per day.

If 5 million views per day does not sound interesting or applaudable to you, I don’t know what is.  The fact still remains though that YouTube is a phenomenon. In fact, its current achievement can be compared to a double prime-time audience of perhaps all three major U.S. television netbworks.

After five years, YouTube has indeed transformed into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, live feeds of an entire sports season, top Holywood feature films, and even documentatries from activitists who want change.

What could be a better way of celebrating its fifth year anniversary but to launch a new YouTube channel that showcase how YouTube has helped changed people’s lives. The YouTube Five Year channel also lets you get into the mix by letting you upload your own video into the channel. But of course, you can’t just upload any videos there. It has to be something that tells about how YouTube has changed your life.

The new YouTube Five Year channel also features an interactive timeline that contains important moments and memes in the short history of YouTube.

Ready with your videos? Take part in this exercise and be part of YouTube’s history.

Originally posted on May 17, 2010 @ 10:43 am

Faster Google Chrome Beta Release Gives You New Reasons to Ditch IE Anew

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How does web page loading speed of 2700 frames-per-second sound to you? If you don’t think its fast enough, I don’t know what else is.  That’s actually the speed that  the new Google Chrome Beta Release promises to give. And while the Google Chrome folks are still busy preparing the results of their speed test you might want to start downloading the new release now, either for your Linux, Windows or Mac machines.

And to encourage you some more, the Official Chrome blog tells us:

Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpiderbenchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.

If browser speed is not really a big thing for you, Google Chrome Beta’s new features might entice you to get the browser. This new release offers not only bookmark synching capability also browser preferences such as themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings and language. This means that you don’t have to do all those stuff again in all your installation of Google Chrome on various machines.

For current Chrome users, if you loved Chrome extensions and Incognito mode, well you can now use extensions while in the said browser mode.

Other new features of the new Google Chrome Beta release include geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets and file drag-and-drop capabilities.  Chrome also welcomes Adobe Flash Player plug-in into the fold – allowing you to browse rich, dynamic websites.

If you haven’t switched to Google Chrome yet or if you’re still using IE, now is the best time to join the world. Grab the new Chrome Beta Release now.

Originally posted on May 4, 2010 @ 5:38 pm

YouTube Rolls Out Seven New Features, Google Buzz Sharing Included

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YouTube wants us to have them in our minds as we spend our weekends at home as it rolls out new features, seven of them to be exact that aims to improve our YouTube experience.  These new features are – five new languages, email alerts, new look for search results page, new sharing options, new upload interface, new player changes and enhance YouTube-for-iPad.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these enhancements.

YouTube has added five new languages – Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian. If you want o view YouTube in any of those languages simply scroll down to the bottom of any page on YouTube, select “language” and click on any language and you’re good to go.

The YouTube email alerts feature has been made more useful Now, you can choose to receive an email alert whenever a new video was uploaded to the channel you subscribed to. Say goodbye to checking your email from time to time just to check whether new video has been uploaded. [Read more…]

Originally posted on April 30, 2010 @ 8:22 pm

LinkedIn Combines People You May Know with Faceted Search

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And so LinkedIn continues to improve on its site features and functionality. The popular business-oriented social networking sites has just improved on one of its most useful network-building feature called “People You May Know,” a powerful way of finding long lost business contacts as well as for building your professional identity. LinkedIn has combined this feature with another great feature called “faceted search.”

With these two useful LinkedIn features integrated, it is now easier to sort through the list of people your may know by companies and schools. You will now be able to easily page through all of your suggestions on the landing page and quickly sort through them by company or school as well as find out which connections you have in common with other LinkedIn members.

From the landing page of the filtered “People You May Know” suggestions, you can filter the results further by various ways to help you find the business contacts that you may have been looking for or possibly chanced upon somebody which you didn’t think you can reconnect to again.

To see the list of people on LinkedIn that you may know, simply click on the “See More” link on the People You May Know box on your LinkedIn profile page. From there you can start scouring through the list and hopefully gets to find contacts and continue building your LinkedIn network.

Originally posted on May 12, 2010 @ 4:51 pm