Google to acquire YouTube.. NO WAY! Lets beat it into the ground

Ugh.. Everyone knows that Google is to acquire YouTube. Well here come the tons and tons of pointless articles as to why this is: good for Google and good for YouTube, bad for Google and bad for YouTube, good for YouTube but bad for Google, good for Google and bad for YouTube… and why the world as we know it will just end.

Here are a few dozen examples: Digg search
And a “round-up” from John Battelle.

Review: Google Music Trends

“Music Trends is a snapshot of the music that’s popular right now among Google Talk listeners. Every Talk user who has opted in to Music Trends will cast their vote automatically, each time they listen to music on their computer. We’ll gather this information and display the trends by genre, listing the favorite songs and artists in each category.” Google Music Trends

While Google Music Trends is a very nice idea, it isn’t a great representation of what is “hot” or “not” in music. The demographic of Google Talk users is not a fair representation of the Internet community. If this technology were to be used to collect information on users who actually use google.com period, then this information would be extremely useful. Sadly, as it stands now, Myspace Music’s Top Bands provides the best data in this market. Look for Google Music Trends to fade away slowly without a peep.

Digg Adds Video Screenshot Preview For All Digg Video Submissions

Ever click on a Digg video submission and regret it 5 seconds later? Well those 5 seconds will no longer be in limbo with the new Video Screenshot Preview Digg has JUST added. To the right every video submission there will be a screenshot for your viewing pleasure. Want to see how it works? Take a look:

From the Digg Blog:

Starting today, all newly submitted videos from YouTube and Google will include static thumbnail previews. Support for Yahoo! videos is coming soon.

This feature is a great addition to Digg, and we here at Ibloggedthis expect for other social bookmarking sites to pick up on this nifty idea. Reddit has a major need for this, and hopefully they will be man enough to copy Digg.

Google shoves Froogle off main page, pushes Google Video

It appears that Google has decided to remove their “Smart shopping through Google” search engine site link to Froogle from the main Google page completely.

Google seems to be focusing on and giving Google Video a real push. With YouTube growing as fast as it is, it’s understandable why they are starting to push Google Video so hard, however it is still very surprising that they removed the Froogle link, especially since Google Checkout was just recently released.

Google Video: Now With A “Mature and Adult” Category

Google Video has always been a great place to go to for funny and original videos; now google video might become a hot spot for those looking for adult videos. If you want to search that category, input the following: “genre:mature_adult” If you really want to test it, supposedly the searchability of this category already works.

Source

Find Apartments With Craigslist and Google Maps With MyApartmentMap

MyApartmentMap combines apartment listings with Google Maps to form a completely new way to find apartments. Need to find a one bedroom apartment close to the highway? How about a studio walking distance to the subway? MyApartmentMap.com makes it easy by visually showing you were apartments are located. Please select a city to start searching for apartments.

My Apartment Map is a tremendous Web 2.0 application that combines two of the great web applications on the Internet. Mixing Craigslist and the available apartments listed on Craigslist, and Google’s map application finding an apartment in a new city is easier than ever. MyApartmentMap is slowly adding cities to their extensive list and should become a very useful and well known tool in the future. The actual design of the website is pretty basic and navigating your way through the site is fairly easy. Overall, the idea and concept behind this site is very well done, and I expect this service to grow rapidly!

Flash Game: Goggles: Flight Simulator Within Google Maps

Goggles allows you to play a flight simulator in the real world using google maps. The airplane is very simply drawn and pretty much perfect for something like this. You have the ability to zoom in and out and turn at will. You can also speed up (a) or slow down (z) at any time. This game is not affiliated with google, but might as well be. The game was created by Mark Caswell-Daniels, and he did a great job; it is very well done and needs to be checked out more than once!

Google Blog Search Dying A Slow Death?

Recently a user on a prominent webmaster’s forum asked the community if anyone still used Google Blog Search. The results came out to be rather suprising:

i didnt even know there WAS a blog search :P

Nope, i hardly ever use it….

haha.. me too… I think people are too lazy to do that… they would just rather search on google itself. Just my 2cents though..

To answer your question, I never use it, and I don’t think any of my users do either.

Probably just another Beta Program that they lost interest in and will let die on the vine.

In the entire history of my site, I haven’t gotten any referrers from Google Blog Search

While this is quite depressing, does anyone actually have any figures? The best I can do is this - I ran a keyword analysis on ‘google blog’ and the top searched term - google blog (obviously ) - was searched only 1812 times last month on Overture US…

Yeah, Google and Blogging in general don’t get along too well it seems.

Well, that didn’t go well. So Google’s blog search didn’t explode to greatness, not a big deal. There are plenty of other blog searchers, and it seems that Google is content with letting “Google Blog Search” die off.

Ebay updates Payment policy and bans Google Checkout

Ebay has updated its Safe Payments policy to include Google Checkout as part of its list of online payment methods not permitted on eBay. According to eBay’s Safe Payments policy, payment service must have a “substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services.”

Google’s spokesperson said yesterday, “Google Checkout is not a beta product. Google has a long history in billing and payments for AdWords and for premium services, such as Google Video.”

“We want to work with everybody”

Google takes action against spammer; Bans 7 Billion pages

Earlier this week there was an article released, explaining how one spammer got billions of pages crawled and indexed by google, by using a sub-domain trick.

Well, Google has now taken action against the spammer, and has banned 7 billion pages. Here is a fun alexa graph, of one of the spammer’s domains. You can see exactly when Google banned the pages.

Don’t F with google, man!

Source: Digg