Even as a Mac guy...

...I gotta admit this is pretty sweet.



Hat tip to Tapan (and congratulations!).

OMG ...1GB!?!

Just got back from a trip to the Midwest with Sansserif, and I finally got around to downloading Picasa's web album uploader software on my home computer so that I could share the photos. As I waited for the program to download, I browsed some of the new Google products under development and found a new YouTube video uploader (along with an interesting 3D drawing program called SketchUp, but that's the subject of an entirely different post).

Coincidentally, I had spent much of the flight home making a "to do" list, and one of the items on said list had been to find the best software for compressing large video files to meet the 100MB file size limit on YouTube. I wondered if they had finally developed an application to automatically restrict video file size to meet these meager limits.

But what I found out was so, so much better: they didn't need to.

I blinked and looked again at the words written in bold. Could there really be a full gigabyte of delicious storage space available for each video I upload? Had I missed a memo or something? Granted, being on a ranch in Nebraska isn't exactly the best way to stay on top of the latest tech news, but I felt like I'd emerged from a black hole or something.

I really have to tip my (cowboy) hat to Google on this one. As Sansserif says, the best part of making a "to do" list is being able to cross off the completed tasks when you finish them. But the best part of my discovery is that I got to cross something off my list and I didn't have to do anything at all.

The Great Debate

You might have noticed a new application on your Facebook homepage announcing the upcoming ABC News-Facebook Presidential Debates. Erick Schonfeld at the TechCrunch blog has some interesting analysis of the debate format, which apparently will not be similar to the CNN-YouTube Debates. "The exact tie-in details to the televised debate are in development," Schonfeld quotes an unnamed Facebook spokesperson as saying. "But this will not be a case where there will be direct questions from users like you've seen in other debates."

So what's the point?

Well, from a marketing standpoint it's sheer genius. After all, ABC will gather real-time data on how many people are watching the live debates from the Facebook demographic--which just happens to be the prized mid-20's, highly educated, young professional. Not a bad day's work, really. At a time when many young people are abandoning the reruns on TV for streaming content online, I'm sure that ABC was able to sell some nice ads for that little Facebook partnership.

But that still doesn't answer the question, what's the point?

I'm torn. In spite of the highly public nature of adding and dropping apps on Facebook, I am planning to add the "New Hampshire Debates" application in the name of social science. In my view, the real question is whether television executives actually have the stomach to utilize the internet for what it's worth. My hunch is that they're too worried about cannibalizing their traditional revenue streams to view the web as anything more than a means to an end. In the meantime, the question of when and how truly convergent content will reach our TV screens remains the great debate.

UPDATE: I suffered through a portion of the Republican debate, and there was no tie-in with Facebook other than branding. Same is true for the ABC News page on Facebook. There's no obvious reason why the partnership really matters to anyone other than the corporations.

...And I Feel Fine

This cover song is always a hit at parties. From BoingBoing:




Hat tip to Americablog.