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Google finally released their own (there have been some more or less well-working rip-offs in the past) mobile version of YouTube at m.youtube.com! the mobile XHTML-application utilizes external video-player software for playback (Real Networks’ media-player in case of most current Nokia-phones). unlike Robert Scoble, who’s on a Nokia N95 going for 750,- USD, everything worked fine on my oldschool Nokia 6630 (after I’ve setup the default data-gateway in my Real Player, that is). naturally, YouTube’s rather poor video-quality translates quite well to the low-resolution screens of most mobile phones…the biggest catch however is, that YouTube currently doesn’t provide all videos on their mobile portal (long tail anyone?). otherwise, the stripped down XHTML-app works quite well - after opening the frontpage, I’ve got video playback started within a single click. I only wish the search-box would have been placed on top of the page, not at the bottom…

have you tried out m.youtube.com on your phone yet? shoot me a comment, and don’t forget to mention which phone you’re on…

Flick-a-day lets users log a face-shot (either directly by webcam or image-upload) each day. the resulting pictures are combined into slideshows/flicks which can be embedded into other webpages through a flash-widget. watch yourself growing old!

Google Operating System has screenshots of the upcoming relaunch of YouTube’s flash-based video-player. although the embedded demo doesn’t work for me, it seems like the new player will feature cue-jumping to parts of the clip not yet downloaded as well as embedded thumbnail-preview of related clips.

Adobe Apollo/Flex continues to dominate this weeks tech-news with two - though distant - product announcements.

Virtual Ubiquity is aiming for a public beta-release of their Flex-based word-processor BuzzWord (Screenshot courtesy of GigaOM) in summer 2007. thanks to Apollo, BuzzWord will run both on- and offline, which puts it way ahead of Google Docs. it’ll be interesting to see if Flash-based apps for print-production will handle pagination and typography better than current Ajax-offerings (Google Docs f.e. sucks majorly by not even supporting headers & footers).

proving that they’re eating their own dogfood, Adobe itself announced plans to release an online, free & ad-supported version of their flagship-product Photoshop. as noted by Michael Arrington, this must be scary news for all the current players in the online photo-editing market…

sooner than expected, Linden Labs yesterday announced integration of voice-messaging into Second Life for Q2/2007, with a beta-run starting as early as next week. while residents have been using Skype and other popular teamspeak-applications since ages, the native SL-feature will go further by offering 3D-enabled, spatial audio. if done properly, this will increase the VR-experience massively.

on-/offline application development-platform Apollo gets presented to the web industry at Adobe Engage. lots of coverage… Read/WriteWeb has a good summary of what could be one if this years hottest products.

Search Engine Land congratulates Flickr on its upcoming 3rd birthday. the photo-sharing community which is now owned by Yahoo! pioneered the frontiers of Web 2.0 in many ways, mainly by bringing tagging and other Ajax-UI paradigms to the mainstream. happy birthday!

the latest flash-based annotation & arrangement-tools of Photobucket sure look good. recording for audio & video seems to be built in too (features currently only available to premium users).

(screenshot courtesy of TechCrunch)

according to Read/WriteWeb, Firefox 3 will offer support for running web-applications offline. though it’s not yet clear on which level this might happen, this is major news for providers of service-based web-software. the biggest advantage of online-apps - using them on any device with net-access with no need to sync data - is at the same time their worst caveat - when connectivity goes down, so do online-apps and all data stored within them (that’s why it is a good idea even for fulltime Gmail-users to backup their mail via POP3).

of course, Firefox isn’t alone in trying to move web-apps offline - Adobe’s Apollo framework promotes offline-services on top of their successful Flash-platform. Flash has bee used to store data in a local cache for quite a time, as it has been the only cross-browser solution besides storing (mini-chunks of) data within cookies (Niall Kennedy gives a good overview on various methods of storing data locally). applications like Scrybe (private beta) let us anticipate the way future online/offline-apps might look&feel.

besides Adobe, several open source projects are working on solutions for the offline-dilemma: the Dojo Offline Project and POW (Plain Old Webserver) both implement a proxy http-server for running local copies of web-applications. while Dojo Offline isn’t available yet, POW - a firefox plugin (which means basically a web-server implemented in Javascript!) - is ready for download.

naturally, existing web-apps require heavy modification to work with any of the mentioned offline-approaches, meaning we still have to wait for real-life apps leveraging the benefits of going offline.

if you’re into music-recommendation & -exploration services, you might wanna check out Musicovery. set your preferred mood (energetic, dark, positive, calm), period (80ies, 90ies etc.) and musical genres, and Musicovery will generate a matching - though static - playlist. while this is definitely inferior to Pandora’s dynamically adjusting streams, Musicovery offers a beautiful flash-based visual chart to freely navigate the tracklist (something Pandora’s free-service offers only under restrictions due to licensing). imagine a similar interface to Pandora’s musical genome database, visualizing all sorts of musical connections & dependencies…I’ld gladly pay a monthly fee for that! (btw, Musicovery charges EUR 2,-/month for its high-bitrate streams, LoFi is free)

with Quick Capture, YouTube has been adding a very interesting feature to their service recently. Quick Capture allows users to record & upload videos straight from their website, without the need of using any additional editing-software. by capturing any connected (web-)cam through a flash-applet, this feature greatly reduces friction in contributing online-video. my guess is, that Quick Capture isn’t primarily aimed at original content creators (those will miss editing-features - which on the other hand could quite easily be integrated later, in a Jumpcut-kind of way), but at people wanting to create instant video-comments on existing clips. YouTube could further support that usage, f.e. by automatically cueing up all video-comments after the original video. however, Quick Capture will certainly accelerate the growth rate of YouTube’s video-stock. plus, it’s simply fun

The second feature introduced is currently only available in YouTube’s beta-sandbox, TestTube. Streams allows users to cluster related video-clips on a topic on a single page. other users can join any existing Stream, contribute their clips into the public cue and exchange chat-messages in realtime. as far as I understand, video isn’t played back synchronously among all participating users, which for me kills the most interesting aspect - watching & chatting about the exact same image-frames as my peers - of Streams. however, by implementing synchronous playback, I think Streams could really become a very hot trend in “social video consumption”…  (via TechCrunch’s Arrington, who wasn’t to fascinated by Streams either).