YouTube Turns Five
The most popular video sharing site on the Internet turned five this week. They have a channel dedicated to the event where users can submit videos detailing how YouTube has affected their lives. YouTube receives over two billion views each day. According to Google, this is almost double the combined prime-time viewing audience for all 3 major television networks. The bulk of their traffic comes from outside of the US, though. YouTube also recently launched a localized South African version of the site.
Springpad Launches for Android
Springpad (getting started guide) has released an Android app, which only makes it more viable as an Evernote competitor. Just as the web interface does, the mobile application adds extra data to whatever you store. This helps to easily create a useful database of stuff with less manual labor on your part. You can also share your items across the social web.
TweetDeck Web Interface
At the Google I/O conference, attendees got a glimpse of an HTML5 interface for TweetDeck, the popular Twitter client. If you were to ask people why they don’t use TweetDeck, one of the primary answers will be that it’s an Adobe Air application. Many users just don’t want that type of overhead. An HTML5 interface for TweetDeck is currently under development and, by the time is actually released, should include support for Google Buzz. The desktop version recently added Buzz support.
Extension.fm Gets Funding and Goes Public
Audio discovery service Extension.fm is an extension for Google Chrome that collects audio streams as you browse the web. You can listen to these as you browse or access them later. It’s pretty different from other services like Pandora and Last.fm in that you probably won’t end up with anything close to a cohesive mix centered around a single artist or band. It provides for a very interesting experience which is now open for all to try.
Twitter Makes Tweetie Free and Dominates App Store
Twitter seems to have accomplished exactly what they set out to do in their purchase of the Tweetie app on the iPhone. A simple change in name from Tweetie to Twitter and the app now dominates the App store. The fact that it dropped in price from $2.99 to free probably helped as well. Most importantly, this change should help Twitter better control the experience for new users.