Facebook announced last week that users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, have increased from 5 million to 15 million during 2008.
While this number constitutes less than 10 percent of total Facebook users, the growth indicates strong interest in mobile social networking.
If Michael Arrington from TechCrunch is right, Google’s iPhone voice recognition application should hit Apple’s iTunes store today. (Apparently there was a misunderstanding between Google and Apple that created the widespread belief that the free application would be available last Friday…)
In any case, Google’s technology is pretty neat. Basically, it enables iPhone users to generate Google search results based on a question they ask into the phone. The sound is converted into a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which attempt to decipher the words spoken, and then send them to Google’s search engine.
Using some of the iPhone’s features, the technology will also take into account the user’s location to generate localized search results.
If Google hasn’t focused much on monetizing its video site YouTube to date… it’s now doing so with a vengeance. On Wednesday, the company announced it will start selling ad space on YouTube search-results pages.
The new advertising feature will allow anyone with a video on YouTube to promote it on a search-results page. Advertisers can bid on keywords and their videos will be displayed on the right-hand side of the YouTube search-results page with a small image and some text.
Advertisers will pay whenever a viewer clicks on the ad and can set their maximum price per click. As in Google Adwords, Google will choose the order in which ads are displayed based on how much advertisers are willing to pay, along with the relevance of the video to the keyword.
Here’s some food for thought (and something worth testing!): if you can give your YouTube video ANY title… does that mean that as long as the keyword matches the title… you’ll score highly on relevance?
So, in other words, can you change the title of your video to suit the keyword you wish to target? Or will Google index the text of the video (if applicable)?
YouTube will show some full-length television shows and films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, one of Hollywood’s venerable movie studios.
MGM will post episodes of its decade-old “American Gladiators” program, along with full-length action films such as “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven” and clips from popular movies like “Legally Blonde.” These will be free to watch, with ads running alongside the video.
While the initial line-up is hardly Earth-shattering, the move reflects a testing of the waters for both companies. YouTube will test the appeal of showing full-length video, while MGM will see whether posting movies on YouTube can be a revenue earner.
comScore reports that 6.5 million Americans tuned into mobile video in August. Among the top operators in the United States, AT&T claimed the most mobile video viewers, with 4.4 percent of subscribers accessing either programmed or on-demand mobile video.
According to comScore’s study, on-demand video was the most popular format, with 3.6 million viewers. Interestingly, amateur videos, such as those on YouTube, constituted the most popular type of content with 1.3 million viewers, followed by music videos and comedy videos.
Music videos, meanwhile, were the top choice for programmed mobile broadcast video users, followed closely by full television shows or films and movie trailers.
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