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YouTube Search Bar: Now You See It, Now You Don'tToday

If you were anywhere in the vicinity of an online video enthusiast who had embedded a YouTube video, yesterday, you were likely greeted with a cacophony of profanities. Why? Many users found their embedded videos were now marred by a large gray search bar plastered across the top of their embeds. Functional though it may have been, it wasn't pretty. And people weren't happy.

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The search bar was part of the YouTube skin, so users could remove it programmatically. But for people with multiple embedded YouTube videos, that meant a lot of editing.

Well, apparently, YouTube was listening. And they've quickly rectified the problem. The search bar is still there, but now with a much more graceful implementation.

As you'll see from the embedded video below, on some of the embedded videos the search bar is now triggered by a mouseover. Move your mouse onto the embedded video and it slides into view. Move it off the video and the search bar disappears.

What if Amazon and iTunes Implemented Facebook Connect?Yesterday

Today was a big day for portable social network data. Both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connection became available for any 3rd party website to interact with Facebook and Google users and their data. We've got our concerns about these kinds of initiatives coming from big companies (see our earlier coverage comparing Facebook Connect to OpenID) but it's also exciting to imagine what kinds of possibilities programs like this will enable.

The folks over at advertising firm Razorfish put together an interesting slide deck today illustrating what kinds of things would be possible if Amazon and iTunes were to implement Facebook Connect. It's a very good jumping off point for conversation about the possibilities in general, so we've embedded it below.

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The following presentation starts out with a basic discussion of Facebook Connect - the action gets started around slide 11. Thanks again to Chris Mes

My6Sense: Personalized Reading Recommendations That Actually Work (500 Invites)Yesterday

Personalized recommendations have always been one of those technologies that look great on paper, but hardly ever work quite as well as advertised. This week, we got a chance to test my6sense, which takes your feed subscriptions and then recommends interesting posts based on your own reading habits. My6sense's current focus is on providing a good mobile experience, though the company will soon also launch its service on the web as well.

While it did take a bit of training before the application fully recognized our preferences and before it returned really good results, the overall results were very impressive.

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Features

So how does it work? When you first sign up, my6sense can import your RSS feeds (from Google Reader, Netvibes, MyYahoo, or from a standard OPML file). After that, all you have to do is read your feeds through the web app and my6sense will automatically learn from your reading behavior (my6sense calls this "digital intuition"). You can also explicitly give a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' on any post.

Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Victorious?Yesterday

Facebook Connect, the system the company has long discussed as "Facebook on sites all around the web," enters general availability today and we've got one big question - should website owners use Facebook or OpenID to authenticate and learn about their users? Will Facebook become a dominant identifier online? Will the OpenID community lose out to the company's proprietary system or will this challenge breathe new life into the movement for open source, standards based, federated user identity?

Open Source vs. Proprietary technology isn't just about desktop software anymore - now it's about our identities and social connections, all around the web. We've published a mind map below displaying our understanding of the contrasts between these two identity systems. If you'd like to add our thoughts to that map, you can.

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This battle isn't about "single sign-on" - it's about the payload that comes with it (friend networks, personal data, maybe more), it's about the developer communities, usability and ownership. It's very important to the future of our user e

Flickr Updates Its Mobile Site, Adds Video PlaybackYesterday

According to Flickr, its mobile site has seen a more than 50% increase in traffic over the last year. Today, Flickr is rolling out a new version of its mobile site, m.flickr.com, which not only updates the user interface in general, but also adds video playback to its already long list of features. Starting today, iPhone and iPod Touch owners will be able to make use of this feature and Flickr will roll out video playback for most other phones capable of supporting video streaming over the next couple of weeks.

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The video platform for Flickr's mobile site is based on Yahoo's Video Platform, which allows Flickr to support a wide variety of codecs and video sizes..

Flickr will also release the new features it first introduced for the iPhone and iPod Touch in October to the rest of its mobile users on other mobile devices with support for Webkit, Firefox Mobile, and Opera Mine. These new features include a more user friendly interface to view your own photos and re