YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Everywhere. This opens up YouTube services and functionality to be used on every website or application that wants to integrate with YouTube and use its services. You can set it up so that your users can upload videos to YouTube and never leave your site. You can retrieve your user’s videos and play them on your site, with a player that you get to brand. You can add/edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc).

This move means that anyone can build a YouTube like capability into their website or application and take advantage of YouTube’s full capabilities and you can do it for free. This is an amazing tool kit that will allow people to build all kinds of interesting applications. All of this will be great to see.

There are also a number of other big implications:

• It increases rate at which GooTube will become the central repository for video content on the web.
• Google will become the largest content delivery network we’ve ever seen. This is bad news for the other players in video distribution business, such as Britecove or Maven Networks.
• And it could be bad news for players such as Akamai, if Google gets way ahead and opens up its content delivery network further.
• GooTube will collect enormous amounts of data about what’s happening with video everywhere on the net and that will be really valuable to advertisers.
• Everything everywhere will speed up a lot, and that means publishers and developers better figure out how they compete in that world.
• Flash/Adobe just increased in value as this will increase the dominance of Flash even further.

Here’s the video version of the release:

Leave a comment with other implications or applications you would like to see people build with this.

You can find more discussion at Techmeme.

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Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google, online video

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, announced that the Google acquisition of Doubleclick is official. And then in true corporate mumbo jumbo he helps us read the tea leafs: Layoffs Coming Soon.

An immediate task we’ll undertake over the next few weeks is matching and aligning DoubleClick employees with our organizational plan for the business. This will involve determining the right staffing levels for all functions and will ensure that we have the right people assigned to the right responsibilities within Google. We plan to complete this process in the U.S. by early April.

Outside the U.S., the steps we will propose are subject to consultation with employee representatives where applicable, and of course any decisions will be made in accordance with local law. The exact timing of the process outside the U.S. will vary based on the needs and requirements of each region.

As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we’ll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all of our clients and employees.

My translation:We will immediately figure out who at DoubleClick we want to keep and who we want to fire. That will happen now in the U.S. Outside the U.S., labor laws make it harder to fire people, but we will get rid of those people at some point too. And then we will get back to kicking Microhoo’s butt.

More discussion at Techmeme

Via a post by Dave Winer at Twitter:

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Technorati Tags: Google, Doubleclick, layoffs

The folks at Google must be smiling tonight. Microsoft has been lured into putting a bid in for Yahoo. This is a waste of time, money and energy by Microsoft and that should make the Google folks more confident that they are on their way to overtaking Microsoft in the battle for leading technology company on the planet.

Combining two companies that DO NOT GET IT is NOT a recipe for competing with one that does. So let me get specific about what I mean by NOT GETTING IT as it relates to Microsoft and Yahoo. Anyone who has used Google Adwords as an advertiser and Google Adsense as a publisher and done the tests on the competitive products from Microsoft and Yahoo knows what I’m about to describe.

When I set up a campaign at Google Adwords, it is an automated process that is rich with interaction and feedback. I can test a campaign, keywords and ads in a very responsive manner that allows me to set it up, test it and optimize it quickly. Yahoo’s equivalent service was a captive to the belief that permeated Overture/Goto that only human editors could screen ads to make sure that they were relevant. It would take days under that process to do what Google did in minutes As a result, I advertise at Google and do so with Yahoo when I get around to it, if ever. (BTW I told this to the senior team at Yahoo’s search marketing group, but they either didn’t want to hear it or could not change the business process that had been set in place 4-5 years before) Since then, Yahoo has tried to reinvent its ad platform and Microsoft has launched their own version, but both still lag way, way behind Google.

How will Microsoft be able to merge two hugely expensive computer platforms when neither is yet good enough to compete with Google’s ad platform? And the same problem exists when you look at it from the publisher side. Google’s Adsense delivers better ads than does the equivalent Yahoo product despite huge investment by Yahoo. What will Microsoft do, scrap one deficient set of systems for another or try to make both work? Either way, the path leads to doom and gloom for both Microsoft and Yahoo.

There is obviously much more to both Microsoft and Yahoo than search and search advertising, but let’s be clear. Search based advertising is the engine that powers Google and everything it does. Social networking/media, a la MySpace and Facebook, has huge potential and Yahoo should have been the king of that domain given all their acquisitions in that arena over the years, but if Yahoo can’t turn My Yahoo, Flickr, GeoCities, De.licio.us etc. into a Social Media powerhouse how can we expect Microsoft to do so.

I can only hope Yahoo turns down Microsoft and they come to their senses. Yahoo can still do great things with the audience and assets it owns by changing its focus to become the queen of social, instead of the king of search. Microsoft should stop listening to bankers and get back to making products that work well and can out perform the competition.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, social networking, social media, search